7 Leadership Practices for Encouraging a Culture of Creativity & Innovation
Highly creative entrepreneurs are rule breakers who don’t like to conform to norms and traditions of the industry.
Highly successful entrepreneurs can creatively look beyond the present and imagine possible futures for their company. If you are a Creative Thinker, you are driven to steer your business in new directions.
Whether introducing new products and services, entering untapped markets, or initiating innovative technologies or production processes, you are constantly thinking of novel ways to propel your business forward. Comfortable with the unknown and the unfamiliar, you always look for new ways to combine and recombine resources to create innovative solutions for your customers.
Your creative action helps you renew your business’ value proposition and differentiate it from your competitors’. It also enables you to disrupt markets by introducing new and unexpected products or by developing novel methods of doing business.
Creative Thinkers are alert to changes in the external business environment — new technologies, shifts in customer needs, industry trends, or competitor actions. You constantly evaluate new possibilities, revise your expectations of the imagined future, and formulate fresh action plans to achieve your goals. This endless cycle of new information, new opportunities, and new action plans helps you start ventures or grow existing ones.
As a Creative Thinker, you are quick to act. You seize opportunities and are usually the first mover in the market. Your unique ability to take an idea and quickly transform it into a business that generates revenue helps you stay ahead of the competition. And your proactivity garners your business high profits, allowing you to establish your brand and capture market share ahead of others in the industry.
Highly creative entrepreneurs are rule breakers who don’t like to conform to norms and traditions of the industry. You refuse to be bogged down by established practices, bureaucratic structures, or arcane business processes. You like to work autonomously, outside the established organizational practices, where you can think and create freely.
You constantly push the boundaries, always experimenting with new ideas to sort the good from the bad. It is this ability to experiment, usually in the face of acute uncertainty, that gives you the potential to generate innovative paths to profits.
A word of caution: While highly creative entrepreneurs are independent spirits who like to work autonomously, implementing ideas requires working with a team. Lack of communication with your team or too much separation from ongoing operations can hurt the development and integration of new products or services into an existing business. Make sure to communicate your ideas and strategies to your team. Sharing will increase the likelihood of launching a successful product or service.
In addition, you may fall prey to “incumbent inertia” as you achieve success and grow. Don’t become complacent with growth. Maintain the organizational flexibility that allowed you to explore your creative imagination in the first place. Continue to pay attention to changing customer needs, evolving technologies, and the shifting business environment. Remember, this endless stream of new information and knowledge will fuel your creativity.
Be careful not to rush to launch new initiatives. Your creative tendency might cause you to experiment and launch multiple initiatives at the same time. This perceived lack of focus may hamper your chances of success. Don’t lose sight of your core business.
Creative Thinker in Action:
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com: “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness. The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously. If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”
Marissa Mayer, president and CEO of Yahoo and former vice president of search products at Google: “The ‘Googly’ thing is to launch it [a product] early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants — and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.”
James Dyson, founder of Dyson: “We are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.”
Maximizing Your Creative Thinker Talent:
The 10 Talents of Successful Entrepreneurs
When Gallup studied entrepreneurial talent, we found a tremendous variety of behaviors among successful entrepreneurs. But after analyzing the data and listening to hours of interviews, we distilled everything down to a list of 10 talents that influence behaviors and best explain success in an entrepreneurial role. Every entrepreneur uses some mix of these 10 talents to start or grow a business:
These 10 talents don’t address every factor that affects business success. Non-personality variables such as skills, knowledge, and experience along with a host of external factors play a role in determining business success and must be taken into consideration when theorizing on business creation and success. But these 10 talents explain a large part of entrepreneurial success and cannot and should not be ignored. Understanding and acknowledging your inherent talents gives you the best chance at success.