Creative Reaction

David Silverman at Harvard Business Publishing, who has worn everything from torn jeans to Armani suits during his career, offers this great essay about business attire.

What does your attire say to your clients and co-workers?  Does it say “I care” or “I don’t care”?

Marshall Goldsmith offers some excellent advice over at Harvard Business Publishing, and while the post focuses on CEO transitions both good and bad, the broader message is one of successful transitions at every level within a business.

Small businesses may write this off as a concern only for large corporations, which would be a mistake. The continuation of vision is an important issue for businesses of all sizes.

Quoting Marshall, “You have a vision for the company. After putting in years to make this vision a reality, you find it important that your vision continue after you leave. By developing an internal successor, you can be assured your vision will be carried out after you depart.”

I would argue that succession planning is most important for a business in which success is largely dependent upon its culture or in which all the employees are working for a goal greater than themselves. If your company meets one or both of theses criteria, you certainly have something worth preserving!

Great post over at Zen Habits explaining how simplifying, constraining, and focusing are tools to boost creativity. Many of the tips can be used by creatives for brainstorming and day-to-day creative work. Others should be noted by managers to make sure they are creating the proper conditions for creative reaction to happen.

Back on September 3rd, we covered a BBC article about Stanford University’s research on the myth of multitasking, and now Harvard Business Publishing has chimed in with their take on the same research.

“Despite starting the research on 100 college students with the hypothesis that multitaskers had some special abilities, the study found that multitaskers were actually quite ineffective at managing information, maintaining attention, and getting results. Compared to study participants who did things one task at a time, they were mediocre.”

There’s still a tendency to stand back and admire multitaskers for being able to do so many things at once. It’s like looking at a bunch of smokers out on the stoop, and catching yourself thinking “Oh, they’re SO cool“, then realizing, “What am I thinking? They are killing themselves and poisoning us!”

Multitaskers aren’t cool. They actually deserve a dope-slap. Especially when it’s you who are paying them.

A great follow-up to Last Friday’s post, Focus on What’s Important, Not What’s Urgent, is an article which explains a system to do just this.

Using Time Effectively, Not Just Efficiently offers a great explanation of the “Urgent/Important Matrix” aka the “Eisenhower Matrix”.

It is a tool to keep us working on what is important, even while faced with things that are urgent (and inevitable interruptions). Focusing on the important is what enables us to meet long-term goals. Worth reading!

Mike Myatt of Blogging Innovation has heard way too much about Equality & Team Building, the idea “that for teams to be productive, employees have to feel ‘empowered’ by having an equal voice”. In fact, he calls this “ridiculous”.

“Whether you look at athletic teams, military teams, executive teams, management teams, technical teams, design teams, functional teams, or any other team, you’ll find that the best of the best have structure, a hierarchy of leadership, a clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and expectations, clear and open lines of communication, well established decisioning protocol, and many other key principals, but nowhere is equality found as a key success metric for teams.”

“Great leaders and highly productive organizations always focus on team building as a key priority”, says Myatt. If you want to be an effective leader of a productive company, read his post.

It wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t so true…

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions. It’s a wonder sometimes that we get anything important done.

Chris Brogan has a great post in which he asks, ”Have you ever stopped to consider how various communication tools impact the person receiving the communication? Have you ever thought about the various friction and interruption costs of various products?” He suggests determining:

1. How important your message is.
2. How quickly you need a response.
3. How willing you are to interrupt the other person.

Every workplace needs to train its employees to ask such questions and establish guidelines. And if possible, allow times for employees to go off-line and actually get some work done.

Based on the number of comments, the article seems to have struck a nerve. Check it out.

Matt Heinz at Blogging Innovation: “I love the idea of employees… thinking of themselves like entrepreneurs.” I couldn’t agree more.

He asks rhetorically, “What constitutes a set of entrepreneurial attributes that employees could emulate?” then answers his own question. I’ve paraphrased (somewhat).

1. Customer-centric thinking.
2. Frugality
3. Creative problem-solving
4. Immunity to fear
5. Acceptance of failure

Imagine having an entire company of people with these qualities. Wow. That’s an engaged workforce.

The 99% has a good article entitled Reclaim Focus, One Day at a Time, which deals with a dilemma faced by most creatives and Professional Knowledge Workers (PKWs).

“Reacting to each request while setting aside time to proactively research and execute new programs is an unrealistic proposition at best, and flat-out unattainable at worst… A lack of focus is at the root of this problem. Constant shifts mean that no task receives the proper attention.”

The author’s solution was to set aside specific days for specific ares of focus, then adjust her own mindset, as well as that of her co-workers according to these tips:

1. Inform those around you that you’ll be switching to this workflow.
2. Stop thinking of yourself as “on-call.”
3. Do something to get yourself in the day’s mindset.
4. Allow a bit of flexibility.

Of course, this means her employer must be more interested in results than procedures.

Managers, how can we allow our employees to be more effective without getting in the way?

The research of Harvard University’s Teresa Amabile on the effects of management, and especially time pressure, upon creativity has been cited a number of times here at CR, so it’s good to come across additional research which both confirms it and refines some of the findings.

Keith Sawyer’s Creativity & Innovation blog summarizes (but does not link to) a 2006 study entitled “The Curvilinear Relation Between Experienced Creative Time Pressure and Creativity: Moderating Effects of Openness to Experience and Support for Creativity” . (An 8-page .pdf)

Without giving too much away, The ability to handle time pressure depends upon how open creatives are to experience, and even then there’s a “sweet spot” for the optimal amount of time pressure. Sawyer does a great job summarizing the research. Check it out.

For those of you still unconvinced, there’s more research featured in this BBC article showing that multitasking is counter-productive. Even more interesting is the fact  that people who think that they are bad at it are actually more productive than people who think they are good at it!

“The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking… (and) when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it.”

(Click on the productivity or the myth of multitasking tags for similar posts here at CR.)