We all know that innovative thinking is vital to individual, team, and organizational success. But we still often put creativity in a box, assuming it’s only for people in certain roles or best attempted once a year at an off-site brainstorming session. Marketing executivesargue that we all need to be exercising our creative muscles more regularly, especially in the age of AI, when routine work can be outsourced to algorithms but new thinking still comes from human minds.
ALISON BEARD: So you both work in marketing inherently creative roles. Why do you see creativity as something that everyone needs to practice rather than only people in specific jobs or at certain kinds of companies? ALISON BEARD: Sue, you mentioned off-site brainstorming sessions, this idea that we all go away with our colleagues maybe once a year, think outside the box, come up with some brilliance, and then come back and typically nothing happens. Why is that? Why can’t organizations put that creativity practice to work in the actual functioning of the business?
SUE UNERMAN: So I think the cadence will to an extent depend on the requirements of the job. You’re not going to come up with four huge ideas every month. What you can do is come up with ideas that will make a difference to the activities that you are doing.
KATHRYN JACOB: The fact that you have so much knowledge about where you work and what you do, and look at just tiny things, which are… Where are the abrasion points in your job, and how could you make that better? And in removing the need to do certain processes or think about consumers in a certain way.
ALISON BEARD: Even Mattel itself to choose to do instead of a cartoon version of Barbie or something incredibly lighthearted, fully happy ending, et cetera, to choose to allow Margot Robbie and her production company to make a political movie of sorts. That was definitely something I don’t think most toy company executives would think they should do.
And then the whole thing when the whole Barbenheimer thing happened and people were using their skills to create a kind of weird joint poster for Barbenheimer and they didn’t say, “Oh, you’re messing with our IP. We are really unhappy.” They loved it. They just let it go. Because the coalescence of those two films, one about the invention of the nuclear bomb and the other about female empowerment, I mean, GenAI would not have come up with that.
ALISON BEARD: Kathryn, you also talk about looking outside the organization to social media trends, to your consumers, to your competitors. But if you’re doing that, how do you make sure that you’re not just copying others? In the UK we have a tea brand called Yorkshire Tea that was the third-biggest brand in the UK. And they’ve turned it round and turned themselves into number one by talking about the fact that they really love tea and it’s all they care about and they’re not part of a multinational. And then they’ve done really, really weird things like biscuit tea. So when you dunk… You probably don’t do this in America, because-KATHRYN JACOB: Very good.
There are so many different ways of sparking creativity. Some of them are simply about leaving your desk or wherever it is you work and getting outside. The variety of the ideas is as important as anything else. ALISON BEARD: If I’m doing this as an individual or as the manager of a team, how do I make sure that the good ideas that do emerge then get purchase within the team or organization? How do I express them? How do I introduce them? How do I get buy-in?
What you do is say you break it down into bite-sized pieces. So you go, “In the first three months of us doing this, this is what we need, and then we’ll need that, and then we’ll need that. And we’re going to work on a squad rotation system. So it won’t involve 350 people from the organization coming to every meeting, a two-hour meeting every week that they don’t want to come to. It’s going to be a relay system, and this is what we think the end point will be.
SUE UNERMAN: So I think we’ve probably got a set of business leaders out there in the world at the moment who are very wedded to left brain thinking. And I know it’s more complicated than left brain and right brain, but I’m going to use that as the analogy. So logical-SUE UNERMAN: Shorthand, yeah, logic. If this plus this, then that you’ll definitely get that outcome. Just thinking about incremental gains from doing what you are already doing, but slightly more efficiently.
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