Are You A Creative Leader?
The Global Leadership Summit is a two-day event that is telecast LIVE from Willow’s campus near Chicago every August to more than 600+ locations in North America. Throughout the fall, Summit events take place in an additional 128 countries—translated into 60 languages. This is the 23rd annual Global Leadership Summit being broadcast around the world to more than 400K people.
Below are my notes from Fredrik Härén’s talk:
What is the relationship between Creativity & Leadership?
Survey:
- How many of you think that being creative is important in your job? 98% worldwide say yes
- How many of you think you are creative? 45% worldwide say yes
- North America 95% say yes
- Sweden 60% say yes
- Singapore & Japan 20% say yes
- China 90% say yes
- Brazil 90% say yes
- South Korea is lowest with below 20% saying yes
- How many of you think your company is doing enough to develop the creativity of their people? 2% worldwide say yes
What is an idea?
“One person takes two previously known things and combines them in a new way!”
- Only God can create out of nothing!
- The Idea formula: Idea=p(k+i) Idea= people (knowledge + information) This is where a person takes knowledge and information and combine them in a new way.
Lesson #1 Seek To Understand First: Just because people laugh or think an idea is bad doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea. It could mean they just don’t understand it.
- People should see to understand first!
He developed a concept of a book that is 50% book and 50% notebook. In other words, half the pages are blank pages. While this main sound absurd or crazy or both, it has actually worked out well for him. The average management book sells 3,000 copies total. He sold 3,000 in Iceland alone, 15,000 in Singapore and more than 150,000 in Sweden.
Lesson #2 Idea-Perception: Your ability to see that the world has changed.
Most people would answer that we went from paper books to e-books as the biggest changes in the book industry over the past 5-10 years. Actually, only 3% of books are e-books. The biggest change is that we went from book to Facebook!
Lesson #3 We Are Stuck In The Past: most of us are so stuck in doing things how we used to do it and no one thinks we are helping them solve the problem
- The Problem: we are in this period of rapid change and we are not as humans very good at change.
- The speed of innovation is speeding up and we need to keep up.
- Science fiction of 50 years ago is now common place in our world today.
- People are stuck in the way we are used to doing it because we were once told this the right way to do it.
- It is important to make your people more creative.
- In order to accomplish this, you must work at being more creative yourself as the example.
Solutions:
1. Imagine the potential if we as leaders saw it as our jobs to make people more creative.
2. Work at being more creative yourself as the example.
3. How do you teach creativity?
- Do creative things and you will inspire creativity in others.
- You learn by doing creative things yourself as a leader.
Leaders need to develop their creativity so they can inspire others to create a better world.
Ask yourself these 2 questions as a leader?
1. What’s the most creative thing I’ve done as a leader?
2. What’s the most creative thing I could do as a leader to inspire my people to be more creative?
Creativity is closely related to create, create is closely connected to creator, and God is the creator. We’re never closer to God than when we create.
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