To enable and sustain a creative culture, heed these guidelines:
• Strong teams make good ideas great and decent ideas good. Build the best team you can.
• Evaluate likely hires for their potential, not their present skills or achievements. “Hire
people…smarter than you.”
• Inspire your people by urging them to contribute. Anyone in your organization must be
free to suggest any idea to anyone else.
• Show your new ideas early and often. Let those who matter witness your process.
• Seek and remedy roadblocks that keep your staff members at every level from speaking
frankly and sharing their opinions boldly. The way people communicate doesn’t need to
reflect organizational structure. “Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.”
• If someone thinks you’re wrong, be open to the “reasoning behind his or her
conclusions.” If you believe you are always right, you will stifle “alternative viewpoints.”
• Find and root out any sources of fear in your organization.
• Beware of any culture more willing to be honest in the “hallways” than in meetings.
• Never fret about who hears about a problem first. Your job as a manager is to deal with it.
• Structuring a message to minimize issues or problems weakens your credibility.
• Create the capability to respond flexibly to the unexpected.
• Worthy managers foster a safe place for employees to take risks. Rules make life easy
for managers, but they can suppress crucial expression.
• Failure is a natural aspect of embracing daring new ways and methods, so accept lapses
as part of the process. Trust your people to make mistakes and support them when they
do. You can never prevent error.
• Those who have the job of implementing projects must be able to make pivotal decisions.
• Never worry about everything going well all the time – it won’t.
• Difficult problems require flexible thinking. Impose only those limits that
inspire creativity.
• Organizations are often more unadventurous and “resistant” than the people in them.
• Departmental “agendas differ,” but their corporate goals must be “interdependent.”
• “Greatness” emerges from “phases of not-greatness.” Protect your people and their ideas
from anyone in the organization who does not understand this basic tenet.
• “Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.”
• People almost always misinterpret success or failure.
• Process is all, but the process is not the goal. “Making the product great is the goal.”