The Creative Priority

"Current organizational models revolving around productivity and efficiency at any cost produce a corporate culture hardly conducive to thinking, much less innovative thinking."

"Creative collaboration between people can occur by an effort to retain conflicting cultural and disciplinary viewpoints in the mind without discarding or allowing either to dominate."

"The least appealing kind of staff I could imagine for any business was a congregation of like-minded yea-sayers, cozy, comfortable, mutually reinforcing, and nonthreatening to top management."

"Every business needs to develop strategies to overcome fear, discomfort, and resistance."

"Good questions are nearly always surprising, provocative, and seem to emanate from apparently skewed vantage points."

"It will always be tempting for management to press for unanimity, which looks more purposeful and feels safer than relying on an internal, individual, and invisible drive."

"Considerable effort must be made to breed a culture not only tolerant of blunders and miscalculations, but one demonstrating an appreciation of their worth."

"The efficiency priority demands a file-drawer approach to organizational design, everyone clearly accountable for work within their own domains, with as little overlap or redundancy as possible."

"In some ways, the gap between distinct departments and professions within the same culture is even more difficult to bridge than that between two countries."

"While there are times we simply crave shutting all the systems down, the more frequent need is to interrupt the daily rhythm and step back from a singular, myopic focus."

"While thinking creatively does involve play, emotions, talent, and dreams, it also demands the fusion of these with clear-headed rationality, relentlessly hard-work, and a firm, sober-eyed grasp of reality."

"Barriers abound in bureaucracies, and one of the most formidable is the strategic plan that stands above all for mature, responsible, and rational corporate procedure."

"It is hard to imagine a business, an institution, or a department that could not be profoundly energized, liberated, and humanized by the recognition of the breeding of original thought as its preeminent organizing principle."