Disciplined Dreaming E-Book

Josh Linkner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 314

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A 5-part process that will transform your organization -- or your career -- into a non-stop creativity juggernaut We live in an era when business cycles are measured in months, not years. The only way to sustain long term innovation and growth is through creativity-at all levels of an organization. Disciplined Dreaming shows you how to create profitable new ideas, empower all your employees to be creative, and sustain your competitive advantage over the long term. Linkner distills his years of experience in business and jazz -- as well as hundreds of interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and artists -- into a 5-step process that will make creativity easy for you and your organization. The methodology is simple, backed by proven results. * Empowers individuals, teams, and organizations to meet creative challenges posed by the marketplace * Turns the mystery of creativity into a simple-to-use process * Shows how creativity can be used for everything from innovative, game-shifting breakthroughs to incremental advances and daily improvements to business processes * Offers dozens of practical exercises, thought-starters, workouts to grow "creative muscles," and case studies Disciplined Dreaming shows even the stuffiest corporate bureaucracies how to cultivate creativity in order to become more competitive in today's shifting marketplace. #4 New York Times Best Seller (Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous) #8 New York Times Best Seller (Hardcover Business) #2 Wall Street Journal Best Seller (Hardcover Business) #9 Wall Street Journal Best Seller (Hardcover Nonfiction) #9 Washington Post Best Seller (Hardcover Nonfiction) #1 USA Today Best Seller (Money) #10 Entertainment Weekly Best Seller (Hardcover Nonfiction) #10 Publishers Weekly Bestseller (Hardcover Nonfiction)

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Praise for Disciplined Dreaming

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Why You Need to Care About Creativity

What to Expect from Disciplined Dreaming

Chapter 1: The Case for Creativity

The Risky Business of Playing It Safe

How Will Creativity Rewrite Your Future?

Are You Ready to Become a Disruptive Force of Change?

Chapter 2: Disciplined Dreaming

Disciplined Dreaming at a Glance

Getting the Most from Disciplined Dreaming

Finding a Home in the Messy Process of Creativity

Step One: Ask

Chapter 3: Defining the Creativity Challenge

Building the Creativity Brief

Bringing Discipline to Your Dreams Through Vision, Clarity, and Action

Chapter 4: Driving Curiosity and Awareness

Asking the Three Magic Questions

Making Meatloaf

Opening Your Beginner's Mind

Developing the Five Skills of Master Innovators

Avoiding the Pike Syndrome and the Brain Trap

Raising Awareness Throughout the Organization

Step Two: Prepare

Chapter 5: Gaining the Keys to a Creative Mind and Culture

Preparing Your Mind for the Creative Process

Building Creative Cultures

Connecting Your Culture to the Future

Chapter 6: Preparing Your Environment to Promote Creative Passion

Breaking out of the Beige Cube Farm

Shaking Things Up

Spending Time Surrounded by Your Challenge

Taking It Outside: The Off-Site

Finding the Right Triggers and Symbols

Step Three: Discover

Chapter 7: Discovering the Ways of Creativity

Looking Through a Different Lens

Capitalizing on Inflection Points

Discovering New Potential in a Borrowed Idea

Turning a Problem Upside Down

Putting Patterns to Use

Step Four: Ignite

Chapter 8: Generating Creative Sparks

Protecting Those First, Fragile Sparks

Twelve Ways to Strike Sparks of Creativity

Secrets of the Jazz Masters

Supporting the Combo

Chapter 9: Igniting the Sparks of Creativity

The Eight Commandments of Ideation

Ignite the Sparks!

Are You Ready for Lift-Off?

Step Five: Launch

Chapter 10: Bringing Your Ideas to Life

Selecting Your Best Ideas

Testing Your Selections

Setting Your Metrics: Measurement

Building Your Action Plan

Taking Care of Business

Epilogue

Appendix A: The Top Six Creativity Myths (and Truths)

Appendix B: Additional Warm-Up Exercises to Jump-Start Creativity

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Notes

Index

Praise for Disciplined Dreaming

“It is often said there are dreamers and there are doers. Never before has someone connected the dots and clarified the path between ‘dreaming’ and ‘doing’ like Josh Linkner has in Disciplined Dreaming. This is a must-read for the innovators and creators who want to cross over to the execution side and make their dreams come to life.”

—Dan Gilbert, chairman and founder, Quicken Loans, and majority owner, Cleveland Cavaliers

“Creativity fuels the growth engine that drives results. Disciplined Dreaming gives us a practical and inspirational roadmap to move us from incremental improvements to radical breakthroughs. Josh Linkner has successfully built some of the most creative companies in the world and shows us the way.”

—Jeff DeGraff, professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author, Leading Innovation and Creativity at Work

“Now all those days I spent dreaming can be put to good use. Disciplined Dreaming helps you harness your creativity. Well worth your time.”

—Keith Crain, chairman and CEO, Crain Communications

“In Disciplined Dreaming, Josh Linkner offers a guide for encouraging and protecting creativity as one of the few sustainable advantages in a relentlessly competitive environment. I would recommend it highly for the leaders and advisors to any high-growth organization.”

—Victor E. Parker, managing director, Spectrum Equity Investors

Copyright © 2011 by Josh Linkner. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Linkner, Josh, 1970-

Disciplined dreaming : a proven system to drive breakthrough creativity / Josh Linkner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-92222-4 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-00169-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00170-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-00171-4 (ebk)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Success in business. I. Title.

HD53.L56 2011

650.1—dc22

2010046965

Dedication

To my incredibly creative kids, Noah and Chloe

Preface

I've had the good fortune to straddle the art world and the business world for the last twenty years. I started performing traditional jazz guitar professionally at the age of thirteen. I would sneak into bars in Detroit, and often played until either the gig ended or I got thrown out. After graduating high school, I attended the Berklee School of Music, then went on to perform internationally, teach lessons, compose music, and study with some of the best musicians in the world. I still perform today, with the GEQ Quintet—a high-intensity, traditional jazz group.

Perhaps surprisingly, jazz has been an outstanding training ground for me as an entrepreneur and business leader. The skills I learned playing jazz translate perfectly into the business world: improvising, dealing with adversity, working through uncertainty, blending collaboration with individual performance, and, most important, creating value through original thought and imagination.

I have launched four high-tech businesses, the most recent being ePrize, which I founded in 1999. At that time, Internet advertising was the darling of the high-flying dot-com world. There were hundreds of emerging online advertising companies. As a marketer, I found it odd that an entire category of the marketing mix—promotions—was largely ignored online. And there was my golden ticket—an opportunity to zag when everyone was zigging, to do the never-been-done-before. ePrize went on to rewrite the rules of a one-hundred-year-old industry.

Within our first five years, we became the dominant player in the world of online promotion, developing more games, contests, and sweepstakes than any other company in the world, both online and offline. The company grew to 350 people with offices in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and London. We gained experience running promotions in thirty-seven countries for seventy-four of the top one hundred brands, including Coca-Cola, American Express, Disney, General Mills, P&G, the Gap, Nike, and Microsoft. In ePrize's ninth full year of business, its gross sales exceeded $70 million.

In the midst of this success, I grew curious. An honest look in the mirror revealed an okay technology guy, an average finance person (at best), and a so-so organizational leader. The more I explored, the more I realized that there was one primary differentiator that fueled my success and allowed me to break the mold: creativity.

I also realized how creatively bankrupt most companies are today. With a constant focus on cost cutting, efficiency gains, and top-down control, too many organizations have lost their mojo. The problem is exacerbated by the ever-escalating arms race for competitive edge. When the dust settles, the only thing that can't be commoditized is creativity. Creativity is what will separate the winners from the also-rans in the emerging world of business—and in life.

That epiphany launched me into a whole new gig. I became obsessed with demystifying creativity and developing a specific system that could be used to nurture, manage, and grow creative capacity. In the process, I interviewed more than two hundred thought leaders, including CEOs, billionaires, musicians, entrepreneurs, artists, educators, and nonprofit leaders, to examine how they used creativity to drive their own success. This book and the Disciplined Dreaming system it describes are the result of that journey, my own riff on exploring and exploiting the vital link that joins creativity and success in business. I hope you enjoy it.

Josh Linkner

December 2010

Detroit, Michigan

Introduction

Only four measures are left before it's my turn to solo, and the adrenaline rush is overwhelming. The dimly lit, smoky jazz club is packed with local aficionados. Guymon Ensley, the bandleader, finishes his scorching trumpet solo, and the crowd erupts with applause. The attention turns to me, as it's now my turn to improvise.

With less than 1 percent of the notes on the written page, I have to make up the rest as I go—spontaneous creativity in real time, no going back to correct mistakes or rethink a passage. The pressure is on, but then again so is the excitement. It's time to bring everything I have to this moment, to deliver a sound that's both technically pure and infused with creativity. Passion and skill must work together to form something new, a jazz performance that works with the other pros around me, that is true to me as a musician, and that satisfies the hypercritical and quite knowledgeable audience.

Replace the musical references here with business lingo, and this scenario describes the daily life of thousands of businesspeople across industries. Like jazz, business success is most often based on creativity and original thought, not technical mastery. Jazz and business legends—people like John Coltrane and Billie Holiday or Henry Ford and Bill Gates—are remembered because of what they created.

Imagine a computer playing a jazz solo; the music would be technically proficient, but lacking in emotion and original thought. That's the same kind of “music” being played by countless businesses today. As economies and world markets continue to change, businesses are constantly being pulled into cost cutting, automation, and risk management. Although these are important elements of business success, we can't lose sight of the driving force of prosperity, the reason that any company exists in the first place, the source of both business and human fulfillment: creativity.

Why You Need to Care About Creativity

Nearly all of the more than two hundred people I interviewed in my research for this book credited creativity as a critically important factor in the success of their company and career. I expected to hear this from artists, musicians, and marketing folks. But I was surprised and delighted to hear the same from finance executives, hard-nosed CEOs, nonprofit leaders, bankers, and even military leaders. Universally, this amazing group of thought leaders stated that creativity was one of the most important ingredients of their success, if not the most important.

Scott Dorsey, the founder and CEO of Exact Target, credits creativity for his success in growing a market-leading $100 million e-mail marketing business with five hundred employees in less than a decade. “Our willingness to embrace creative problem solving and experimentation enabled our growth at every level—from raising capital to developing technology to winning customers. Creativity was the key ingredient.”1

Steven Bean, CEO of Universal Laundry, feels the same way. “Creativity is fundamentally responsible for the success and direction of both my company and my career. It impacts our strategy, marketing, and business processes.”2

John Balardo, publisher of Hour Media, agrees on the impact creativity has had on his career. “Creativity has been paramount in my success. The highest level of importance. We are in a highly competitive industry that is becoming increasing commoditized. It is a cluttered industry, with tough competitors fighting ruthlessly for share of mind. In our case, we must offer something different and compelling. That's where creativity comes in. Without it, we wouldn't stand a chance. This is especially true in tough times. When things get rough, we need to double down on our creative efforts in order to stand out.”3

An overwhelming majority of those I interviewed also told me of their concern about an increasing dearth of creativity in the business world. They are worried that they lack specific systems to build, nurture, and manage creativity and are concerned that they could begin to lose competitive advantage unless this trend is reversed. When rating the importance of creativity in the business world, the group averaged 8.9 on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest). But how did they rate their organizations in terms of being prepared to meet that creative demand? The ratings averaged only 4.7.

These dismal numbers confirm what many business leaders already know: we have an increasing need for creativity in the business world, but a decreasing supply—conflicting trends that have created a large and growing creativity gap. For perhaps the first time in our history, American creativity is on the decline. In fact, researcher Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary has found that predictors of creativity among our population rose steadily until 1990, but have been inching downward ever since, in what Kim describes as a “very significant decrease.”4

The creativity gap will determine the economic potential of every individual and organization in the years ahead. You have to address this gap in your own life and organization if you plan to grow your career, if your company plans on winning in the future, and if our country is to maintain its standing in the world as an economic superpower. Closing the creativity gap is what Disciplined Dreaming is all about.

What to Expect from Disciplined Dreaming

Disciplined Dreaming is a system for expanding creative capacity, fueling competitive advantage, and building personal and professional growth. This book describes that system and offers a proven framework for generating creativity. Businesses have systems and processes for everything, from answering the phone to taking out the trash. Remarkably, most companies have no such system for the one thing that matters most: developing and growing creative capacity. Disciplined Dreaming provides a specific system to attack any Creativity Challenge, big or small, and, in the process, to build a culture of creativity and sustained growth for individuals and their organizations.

Companies that have “innovation processes” often stifle the creativity of their organization by making those processes too rule driven, formal, and restrictive. In contrast, Disciplined Dreaming is an open system that focuses on the creative mind-set and philosophy along with specific techniques, rather than a rigid code of rules. I've based this system on my own ideas and experiences, as well as those of successful business leaders around the globe. This book is a guide to that system, not an instruction manual.

The first two chapters outline the compelling case for creativity in building business success and introduce you to the Disciplined Dreaming system for creative growth. The remaining sections of this book follow the five-step methodology of Disciplined Dreaming:

Step 1: Ask. The first step of the Disciplined Dreaming process is identifying and clearly defining your specific Creativity Challenge (whatever its size). In Chapters Three and Four, you'll learn how to define your Creativity Challenge while driving curiosity and awareness in order to focus the energy of your team.

Step 2: Prepare. Next, you have to make sure you're ready to meet the challenge you've identified. Chapters Five and Six offer key concepts for preparing yourself mentally and physically for the creative process and for positioning your environment for maximum creative output.

Step 3: Discover. In the Discover phase of Disciplined Dreaming, you explore every avenue that might lead to creative ideas. Chapter Seven offers a wealth of techniques for charting your creative road map.

Step 4: Ignite. Now you're ready to let your imagination soar. Chapters Eight and Nine outline proven techniques for sparking creativity and generating more (and better) creative ideas.

Step 5: Launch. Your final step is to make your best creative ideas a reality. Chapter Ten outlines a framework for selecting your best ideas and putting them into action.

As you read, you will find a step-by-step process with stories, examples, and practical exercises that you can put to use immediately in order to become more effective and to develop your creative chops. The book offers plenty of inspiration, but it also provides specific and practical takeaways to drive the success of your company and your career. You'll find plenty of frontline insights from the interviews I've conducted, along with my own observations and experiences. Improvisation is a spontaneous burst of creativity, and to keep the tempo brisk, this book gives a nod to many of the strong and sometimes surprising links between improvisational jazz and business innovation.

Disciplined Dreaming is a methodology that can help anyone—from the single mom raising her kids to the freshly graduated engineer growing her career; from the clinical psychologist working to connect with his patients to the local deli owner looking to bring more hungry customers in the door at lunchtime on Tuesdays—find more creative solutions to the challenges he or she faces. Although many of us have let our creativity fade over the years, each of us has an abundance of creativity within. This book will give you a system for revealing your unique creative nature. Get ready to let your ideas come out and play.

Chapter 1

The Case for Creativity

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.

—General Erick Shinseki

A friend recently came to me to ask for advice about his business, a promotional products company. He lamented that he was stuck: revenue was flat, and he couldn't seem to get to the next level. I began to toss out ideas of new ways to get customers, approach the market, expand his offerings, and improve his processes. With each suggestion, his reply was, “No. That's not the way it's done in my industry.”

After a few rounds of this, I decided to give him some straight-between-the-eyes feedback: “If you're unwilling to be different,” I said, “you'll never get to the next level. The very fact that the entire industry does something a particular way is a great reason to explore the exact opposite approach.”

My friend isn't alone in the challenges he faces. In this post-recession era, just about every industry is in the midst of massive upheaval, with companies hyperfocused on cost cutting, efficiency gains, and “sticking to their knitting.” You can only cut so far, though, and at some point you need to innovate and grow in order to win. The business world is at a critical inflection point, leaving companies with that dreaded choice: adapt or die—which makes this the perfect time for you to focus on finding new and more creative ways to beat your competitors.

The Risky Business of Playing It Safe

In this new democratized world, competitive advantage has a short shelf life. We've entered the Age of Creativity, in which each incremental gain is zeroed out as global competitors quickly copy and adapt. There are four factors fueling the creativity arms race:

1.Commoditization. In the words of casino magnate Steve Wynn, “What used to draw a ‘wow’ 15 years ago wouldn't draw a yawn today.”1 Easily accessible and free online information makes new knowledge a readily available commodity, which can leave price as the sole differentiating factor among competitors. You can't grow a career or business strictly by being the lowest bidder.

2.Speed. Complete business cycles that used to span a decade or more now play out in a matter of months. It's no longer about the big beating the small. Now it is the fast beating the slow.

3.Low barriers. In the past, bringing a great idea to market might require significant resources—a huge outlay of capital, a factory, raw materials, labor contracts, and distribution. Those barriers made competitors fewer in number and easier to identify. Today, a kid in his college dorm room with a high-speed Internet connection launches Facebook and becomes a billionaire in twenty-four months.

4.Lower costs. Globalization, outsourcing, and an intense cost-cutting mentality in the business world have driven costs to their lowest levels in history. The price war has now become just one skirmish on a much more complex battleground.

The world doesn't need another “me-too” player. Consumers have nearly limitless choices of products and services. Employees now compete with others around the globe for jobs. Strong technical skills, quality, and good service once won the game, but today they're just the ante. Success in the new era of business is driven by your ability to stand out and be truly remarkable. That requires an ability to tap into creativity, break the mold, introduce disruptive change, and dislodge the status quo.

Over my career, I've been in the fortunate position of being the dislodging force rather than the one being dislodged. I've also seen that the top of the heap is no place to relax and think “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.”

In the sweepstakes world, one company in New York dominated the industry for twenty-five years—then it didn't. Think how it must have stung when ePrize, a small upstart company from Detroit, came along and took the lead with 83 percent more programs. Or how sharp the pain was the next year when our lead rose to 260 percent.

Like all change agents and creative disrupters, we didn't win because we executed the old model more efficiently. Change agents win because they have the courage and creativity to break the mold. Red Bull broke the mold by launching an entirely new beverage category: the energy drink. Michael Dell broke the mold by selling computers directly to the consumer and cutting out the middleman. Jazz legend Charlie Parker broke the mold by challenging conventional wisdom and playing previously “forbidden” notes over smoking fast-tempo chord changes.

Great companies are always built on ideas. They discover new and compelling ways to solve problems for customers. They play to win rather than playing not-to-lose. In fact, we've reached a time when playing it safe has become the riskiest move of all. General Motors played it safe all the way to bankruptcy. Maxwell House played it safe as the more daring and creative Starbucks supplanted it as leader of the coffee industry.

This concept applies not only to breakthrough corporate innovation but also to individual careers. Have you ever looked at the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans? To qualify these days, you need to be at least a billionaire—pretty high stakes. In reviewing the list, I noticed something right away: there are no Forbes 400 billionaires who earned their wealth by playing it safe, cutting costs, and following the rules. Quite the opposite: every one of these people did something new and different. From retail to software to manufacturing to creating a new kind of candy bar, the ideas these people generated changed the world. And in every case, the genesis of their success traces back to a lightning bolt of creative inspiration.

Why aren't more of us channeling that creative energy? Blame it on the gremlin—that invisible source of self-doubt that sits on our shoulder and reminds us of every negative adult, teacher, boss, coworker, media analyst, or other influence that discouraged us from embracing those bolts of inspiration. The gremlin holds us back. He fills us with fear and tells us to keep our thoughts to ourselves. He makes us believe that letting our creativity out will make us look foolish or doom us to failure. This gremlin is, of course, dead wrong. The people in companies that thrive ignore their gremlins.

At the end of the day, the only sustainable competitive advantage—for individuals and companies—is creativity. It can't be copied or replicated. It can't be outsourced to the lowest bidder. It can't be done faster overseas. Creativity will build our future, just as it's built our past. As we have done throughout history, we ignore those who huddle in fear, and celebrate and reward the risk-takers, innovators, and creators.

How Will Creativity Rewrite Your Future?

You may be thinking, “Well, that's great, but I'm not a billionaire. I don't want to start and build my own company. I'm not an inventor. All this doesn't really apply to me.” That's your gremlin talking, and he's wrong—again.

The concept of leveraging creativity to grow success applies regardless of who you are, what your job currently is, or where you're positioned on an organization chart. People who demonstrate curiosity and courage become indispensable to their companies. They get promoted and rewarded. People who can imagine new alternatives to tough problems help nonprofit organizations increase impact. People who explore boundaries and try new approaches in education are the ones who make a difference—the ones schoolkids remember.

What is happening in your industry? Can you truly afford to sit back and rely on your past success? How are you going to win on the next leg of your journey? Will you be the disruptive force of change through courageous risk-taking and breathtaking creativity, or will you be like so many people, shrugging your shoulders wondering what happened to your business? Let's look at just three ways that creativity will determine the answers to these questions.

Succeeding Through Improvisation and Risk-Taking

Business culture is beginning to reward improvisational “players” who, like great jazz musicians, are comfortable taking risks and capable of extraordinary and spontaneous bursts of creativity. Jazz musicians are a curious breed. They study for years to master the rules, only to break them as quickly as possible. They approach their craft with intensity and purpose, but then can let go and just groove when the feeling is right. I've known musicians who are incredibly bold and expressive on the bandstand, but thoughtful and tempered in conversation.

All these dissonant notes blend into the creative harmony of a culture that encourages risk-taking and shuns sameness. Jazz combos don't just accept the improvisation and risk-taking that goes along with creativity; their entire purpose is to be creative. Oddly, most businesses don't connect their purpose with creativity. They have mission statements packed with industry buzzwords, but most of them are completely missing the point of their organization's existence: to create new and better ideas.

As I grew ePrize from an idea into the dominant industry leader, improvisation—creating something out of nothing, in real time—was as central to my business as it is to jazz. The business had the frenetic energy of a live jazz gig, often a little off balance, but always exhilarating. We didn't have an instruction manual; we had to make things up as we went along. Some decisions failed; some worked out. Either way, we kept things fast, fluid, and creative. We were decisive even in the face of ambiguity. And when we made mistakes, we learned from them quickly and adapted.

How APRIL Links Business and Jazz

Jazz musician and author Michael Gold agrees that the same principles that make jazz groups succeed also drive successful businesses. He's collected these principles under the acronym APRIL:2

Autonomy. Team members are in control of their own performance, experience, and results.

Passion. “Players” are driven by something bigger than just the task at hand.

Risk. The working environment celebrates risk and failure.

Innovation. New ideas are rewarded.

Listening. The culture emphasizes raising awareness and connecting to the environment.

How does your organization stack up against the APRIL principles? Do you encourage autonomy or seek control? Is passion a buzzword, or do you demonstrate and reward it? Is risk a taboo four-letter word? Is innovation “owned” only by those at the top, or is forging new ground an assignment for everyone at all levels of the organization? How do you communicate with your colleagues, suppliers, and customers?

We were fluid with our offerings. We listened to what the client wanted, and if we thought that we could improve and build it for them, we'd take the job. This improvisational mind-set fueled our R&D efforts. Many of our best, most sustainable products originally came from a one-off client request. The client would request a new type of promotion, and we would work around the clock to develop the product as though we already had it. Rather than building a bunch of products in the hope that they would sell some day, we would wait until we had a buyer and then use the revenue from that client to fund our product development. We bit off more than we could chew, and then chewed as fast as we could. Real-time R&D, jazz style.

Companies that will win in the future will function more like jazz bands. They will constantly reinvent their work and seek fresh, new approaches. They will reward risk-taking and originality, the new currency for success. And although businesses will always have leaders, as organizational structures flatten, everyone's voice will have a greater chance of being heard. Your ability to improvise and your comfort with risk-taking will determine how well you succeed in this increasingly creative culture.

Thriving in an Adapt-or-Die Marketplace

People fear change. When a radical new idea emerges, it is almost always met with criticism, resistance, and doubt. Even though clinging tightly to the status quo feels safe, it's one of riskiest moves you can make. In an adapt-or-die marketplace, creativity is the air supply that keeps individuals and organizations thriving.

Out there is an entrepreneur who is forging a bullet with your company's name on it. You've got one option now—to shoot first. You've got to out-innovate the innovators.

—Gary Hamel

When I launched ePrize, I had plenty of naysayers telling me my ideas would never work. But that rain of negativity only fueled my determination to succeed. I set out to build a company that would essentially reinvent itself on a continuous basis. My favorite saying was (and is), “Someday, a company is going to come along and put us out of business. It might as well be us.” In 1999, when I told the first employee I hired that he wouldn't recognize ePrize in six months, I had no idea how right I was.

Within months, the dot-com meltdown had turned the once-fashionable “e” at the front of an organization's name into a scarlet letter. The small, venture-backed companies that made up our customer base were dropping like flies. My young company faced a huge challenge: adapt or die.

The solution was pretty simple: we needed to stop focusing on the Petfood.coms of the world and turn our attention to the P&Gs. We had to adapt all our technology, product, and service offerings to fit the needs of large-brand clients—which required a lot of creativity and a willingness to completely upend industry norms. We kicked around endless ideas, until we finally came up with three winning strategies:

1.Relentless selling. At that time, many marketing and promotion agencies waited for their phones to ring and prided themselves on never having to “sell.” I took the opposite approach. I hired the best people I could find and then trained them to be a killer sales force. We conducted role-playing drills. We made target lists and pursued them with vigor. We used a go-to-market strategy of aggressive, direct selling in a world that never had seen such a thing.

2.Building the brand. We realized that our brand had to look bigger than the size of our company. Our sales materials were beautifully designed and printed on the best paper. An aggressive PR effort got us featured in trade journals and business publications to establish third-party credibility. We positioned ourselves as the expert and leader in a new category within our industry—digital promotions.

3.Offering something unique. We worked hard to develop a few products and features that no one else was offering. Potential clients wanted to meet with us just so they could learn about the “next new thing.” That gave us an opening and often got us an initial order.

Our organization's creative muscle helped us thrive in the changing marketplace, while our less creative competitors failed to adapt—and then died. Today, variations on this same song of survival are playing out in organizations around the world, and in every case, creativity is the one constant note.

People and organizations turn their backs on change out of fear, allowing bureaucratic cogs in the machine to get in the way of great ideas and dreams. Twenty years from now, they'll be long gone, and organizations who walk boldly and create something new will dominate the marketplace. The risks you take in leveraging creative ideas are much less than those you take when sitting in stunned silence as opportunity passes you by. More than an essential survival skill, creativity is the key to thriving in a rapidly evolving marketplace.

Focusing Bets on the Future

All companies make decisions about where to place their bets. We're all faced with limited resources (time, money, talent) and have to choose where to deploy those resources in order to reach our goals. Although most companies begin with a bolt of creative inspiration, it takes real creative capacity to make the choices that will keep an organization energized and growing into the future.

As a company matures, its focus can slowly shift from creativity to execution. Real customers and employees and vendors demand attention, leaving less time in the day to ponder the universe and think up cool new ideas. As leaders focus on building systems and processes to run the place, a bureaucracy is born. Territories form and creativity drops, as the company bets all its resources on protecting the golden goose that established its place in the industry. In the past, this model could sustain a business for years or even decades, but in the new world of business, it just doesn't fly.

Microsoft is a great example of the dangers of betting on the past instead of the future. Windows and Office remain dominant in the market, and have generated over $100 billion in profit for Microsoft in the last ten years alone.3 For years, Microsoft was the poster child of innovation and thought leadership; but then its focus began shifting to past successes, causing the company to miss out on important advances. While Microsoft placed its bets on an established customer adaptation cycle, its competitors innovated. So the company lost to Kindle, Sony, and Apple in the e-book world. It lost to Google in the Internet search world. It lost to Wikipedia in the online encyclopedia market, and it lost to Apple iPod in the digital music sphere. And Microsoft completely missed mobile phones and tablet PCs.

The rate of change in the new era of business has dramatically accelerated, and ever-shorter product life cycles put ever-greater demands on creative capacity. The new model for winning a better future is to remain on the forefront of innovation. To do that, organizations have to use their resources to place smarter bets, earlier and faster. That requires the creative foresight to know when it's time to shift investments forward—even if it means sacrificing the golden goose.

Are You Ready to Become a Disruptive Force of Change?

You may not like it, you may wish things were different, you may look fondly at the past, but none of this matters: the rules have changed. The financial meltdown and global recession of 2009, combined with globalization, rapid advances in technology and communications, population trends, geopolitical movements, and a next-generation workforce, have made the past irrelevant. These changes punctuate the end of an era and signify the beginning of a new one.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

This revolution isn't about just digital promotions or eBook readers or online shoe stores. Nearly every industry is in the midst of transformation. Careers and jobs are being dislodged and reinvented at a dizzying pace. For you and your company to win in the Age of Creativity, you need to nurture and develop your creative skills, to become more like an artist than a technician. In this marketplace, you have to be able to add value in the face of uncertainty. You can't rely on a rule book to figure out what to do next. Instead, your rewards will be based on fresh ideas, improvisation, and a willingness to release your grip on the status quo. You need to be the disruptive force of change, or you run the risk of getting knocked out of the competition.

Building Your Creativity Chops

Jazz musicians call the time and effort they invest in developing their musical skill “building chops.” The Disciplined Dreaming system I'll introduce to you in the next chapter of this book brings you a framework of ideas, processes, and practices for building your chops by expanding your creative capacity. At the close of most chapters of this book, you'll find a short list of ideas and activities aimed at helping you assess and review what you've learned, like a jazz artist practicing musical scales. In this first set, you can answer the following questions to gain a clearer picture of the way you currently approach the creative process:

1.