Welcome to Module 2, a module on creativity, and welcome to my home, and my kitchen. I love to cook, an amateur to be sure, but I get great pleasure from it. Like many who choose to enter the profession seriously, I was inspired by my mother who was always in the kitchen it seemed. For her growing up, very poor, and in very difficult circumstances, putting food on the table meant a lot. She took great pleasure in cooking for her family, and of course, she cooked every day. In fact, one of my earlier memories is walking home later in the afternoon after playing outside with my friends, and before I got to my front door, I could actually pick up the delicious smells of what my mother was cooking for dinner that night. As I share this anecdote with you, I can easily picture it in my mind's eye, the front walk to the house, the door, the smell, and the warmth when I walked in. It's for this reason that I wanted to bring you into my home for this module on creativity. Creativity is in each of us, whether we know it or not. Great chefs create great things in their kitchens, but so do we in our kitchens, and out of our kitchens. The kitchen is particularly relevant for me because my style of cooking, like most of the things that I do, is very, let's say improv. Yes, there are recipes, and I use those recipes, but probably as a starting point more than anything else, and then I add, I subtract, I adjust, I refine. If I have certain ingredients in the fridge, and in the pantry, I'll cook with those, and figure out how to make it taste good. Let's keep in mind the metaphor of the kitchen in this module, a place for experimentation, for recombinations, for improv. In some, a place for creativity. By the way, did you note how I titled this module, How to Become a Creative Leader? I won't be giving you abstract, an actionable or irrelevant pointers on creativity, something designed more for artists, more than everyday people. Although I expect many people who do work in the arts are going to enjoy these courses, that's for sure. Every part of this module is how to, because I absolutely believe that each of us, and every one of us can be more creative. Look, we're not going to become Picasso, I got that, but we don't have to. Wherever you are today in your own creativity, and your comfort with thinking, and acting innovatively, I know we can push that up a little higher. Some people have more natural creative talent, of course they do, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us can't get much better too. It's like the debate on leadership, are leaders born or made, is creativity innate or cannot be learned? Well, I am here to tell you without any doubt whatsoever, that we are all capable of learning to be more creative, more innovative. If I didn't believe that about creativity, and about leadership for that matter, I wouldn't be doing this Coursera course or any of the others on strategic leadership, I wouldn't have stayed being a professor all these years either. Of course, we can learn, it's time to strip away the false notions and assumptions that limit our aspirations to do great things, I don't live that way, and I don't want you to live that way either. Creativity and imagination, when you think about it, are actually at the heart of scientific breakthrough. Here's a quote I found in a 2013 article in The Atlantic by the writer Anna Konnikova, where she referenced Nobel Prize winners Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein. Konnikova, if you don't know her, she's a PhD psychologist, bestselling author, she's written about joining the World Poker Tour, which has actually done really, really well, as well as the creativity of Sherlock Holmes, among many other topics. Here's the quote, "It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science, he, meaning Richard Feynman, once told an audience, echoing the lament of fellow physicist Albert Einstein who, too, bemoaned our propensity to embrace logic at the expense of imagination and intuition, and he did so as early as 1929. Now, there is evidence that this tendency to dismiss the imagination of the scientific approach goes much deeper than mere observation. In their frustration, Feynman and Einstein captured what appears to be a basic tendency of the human mind." Isn't that interesting. I mean, I can't say we're living in a time when logic dominates all public discourse as much as Konnikova suggests, but she's absolutely right to call attention to Einstein and Feynman, and their lament about imagination, and intuition. We are in the age of analytics, as I'll take on in another video in this module, but I see this sentiment from the Nobel Prize winners to be a warning shot, that maybe, just maybe the pendulum is swinging too far away from creativity and imagination. I like Moneyball as much as the next guy, but what happens when everyone is playing to the same analytics script, how do you differentiate yourself then? Let's also remember that leaders who are creative simply do better. For example, one evening at the office, the restaurant builder who I profiled in the Superbosses course, Norman Brinker brought up a memo his most senior direct report had recently sent to a team member directing him in some detail to take a specific action. The senior manager who I was talking to told me the story, he remembers, Brinker said, "This is a thought for you, the next time you're going to tell someone like Bill to do something, try to give them the objective and leave it up to him to figure out how to do it. You'll find out soon enough how smart he is or he isn't, and he'll probably come up with some things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself." That's not a bad way to think about managing people any day of the week. Why is creativity so important? If I use the word innovative instead of creative, this question wouldn't even come up, would it? If it makes you more comfortable, you can absolutely use the word innovative instead of creative throughout this module, but I purposely choose creativity as a word because it makes it more personal, and it is personal. This is about you as an individual, a human being, doing your job, living your life, and just trying to make it all special for you, your family, your friends, your loved ones, and your communities. I'll let you in on a little secret, when you regularly look for creative, make that innovative if you like, solutions to problems, you become more valuable to your employer and your colleagues, where others see dead ends you see opportunity. Creativity is all about the ability to generate potentially new solutions to new and old problems. When you apply the same tools that I'm going to share with you in this module to your personal or family life, all of a sudden, seemingly intractable problems might become more manageable. Look, this is not magic, and I can't guarantee that's always going to happen, of course not, but without bringing creativity into your life as your friend, I'm pretty sure those same old intractable problems are not going to disappear on their own. I want to also say something that has been true for me, and I think will be true for you, it's just plain fun to bring creativity into your life. I mean, it's fun. I'm sure you've said or heard others say or no doubt you've noticed it yourself, how children are so joyful, they're always exploring, questioning, wondering, sometimes being silly, but always learning. Is it any wonder that all this is going on, especially in the years of greatest development intellectually, physically, socially. Well, aside from the physical growth, I'm not going to get any taller, the rest is absolutely true for adults. Maybe we just forget what we knew when we were kids, the act of being creative brings more joy, more learning, more accomplishment, of course, it does. Now, let's see if we can get a little of that back for ourselves again.
