Brain Freeze

I was listening to an e-briefing today jointly sponsored by the Strategic Decisions Group and Stanford University on tapping creativity for profit, and I was struck by how frozen companies can get when it comes to innovation.

All too often it comes down to the right brain/left brain disconnect where people and businesses have a hard time getting creativity and business discipline to come together.

When this happens executional frost-bitten results in entropy. In Information Theory, Entropy is the measure of the rate of transfer of information in [that] message. If you don't believe, just read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.

What the briefing pointed out is that Creativity is all about
- customer experience
- "wow" factors
- excitement
- but no evaluation by "controllers."

while Value Discipline is about
- share-holder value
- analysis
- number crunching
- but creativity is only a "nice-to-have" after financial targets are met.

Yet there are examples of success: A.G. Lafley at P&G, Jim McNerney at 3M and Steve Jobs at Apple. All three drove share-holder value by combining design and creativity with value/business discipline.

The proposed model from the e-briefing is flip back and forth between applied creativity and value significance, recognizing that sometimes you think one way and sometimes you think another.

Yeah, well, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the mark of a genius was the ability to hold two thoughts in one head at the same time. However, no one ever called Fitzgerald a genius. A great writer, yes. But no smarty pants.

The way to accomplish this is to combine creativity and value significance into one compelling mission statement. When I was put in charge of Listerine Pocketpaks, I told the team that our goal was to be product of the year in Business Week. Everyone, marketers and scientists and financial analysts, all got it. We achieved that goal.

Creating a compelling mission is the way to avoid brain freeze in an organization.