标题: About Creativity(附评析，并面向CDer的寻找创业partner) [打印本页] 作者: JQ123 时间: 2011-8-2 04:35 标题: About Creativity(附评析，并面向CDer的寻找创业partner) By Andrew Hill 摘自《金融时报》 In 2008, Samsung ran a print advertisement picturing a lissome young couple next to a forest road. They have dismounted from their mountain bikes to tend to an injured young deer. Mr Lissome has unfurled a flexible electronic display from the side of his mobile phone and is consulting a website about first aid for fawns. Samsung researchers are “inventing new technologies one could only imagine”, the copy boasts, “so getting real-time interactive first-aid instructions for a wild animal at a moment’s notice becomes a real possibility”. I cut out the page and stuck it above my desk: a warning of what could happen if innovation were allowed to run amok. Keeping innovation useful is a constant challenge for big companies, partly because it is so hard to pin down. Asked to pick from four definitions of innovation at London Business School’s Global Leadership Summit last week, 58 per cent of the audience selected the shortest and widest (from The Economist): “fresh thinking that creates value”. But such a broad definition could be applied not only to the technology that may give the world the mobile emergency veterinary information service it has long desired, but also to the service itself, to the way it is conceived, developed and sold, and even to the business model of the company that came up with the idea. No wonder virtually every business with a public face includes the word “innovation” in its mission statement, making the term as meaningless as “shareholder value” and “sustainability”. Yet I still agree with the broad view laid out decades ago by management thinker Peter Drucker: that innovation is one of only two basic functions of business (the other being marketing). Without innovation, as George Buckley, chief executive of 3M, pointed out at the LBS conference, most companies would never beat a benchmark growth rate. Yet even Mr Buckley, a hard-headed Yorkshireman running a global manufacturer, says the greatest innovations benefit from a sprinkling of hard-to-define “pixie dust”. Try putting that in a spreadsheet and determining its return on investment. How to foster innovation is easier than deciding what it is. Academics and executives agree that freedom – including freedom to fail occasionally – is one key to creativity. Small, fexible, diverse groups of workers will generate more ideas than hidebound hierarchies. Managers should encourage staff to talk to each other and share ideas, increasingly with inventive third parties from outside the company. They should also give reports space and remove barriers between divisions – sometimes literally. A new report out on Tuesday from Microsoft says shared workspaces and open stairwells all help encourage chance encounters that generate fresh ideas. It says GlaxoSmithKline and Philips are examples of “hybrid organisations” that have reaped the benefits. Finally, innovators need time. Google is known for allowing its engineers “20 per cent time” – one day a week to work on their own projects. 3M has offered its staff “15 per cent time” since 1948 (although, interestingly, it works out more like 5 per cent when staff who decline the offer are taken into account). Applied loosely, these suggestions would be a licence for laxity. Companies need to focus. Procter & Gamble’s attempt to “systematise” innovation gets star billing in the latest Harvard Business Review. Half its projects now meet profit and revenue targets, up from 15 per cent in 2000. ArcelorMittal, which boasts that innovation “is a mindset”, concentrates its $280m research and development budget on automotive steel, where it can add most value by improving the high-margin products’ ability to compete against carbon-fibre or aluminium alternatives. One of the biggest challenges for chief executives and boards is to know when to kill off developers’ ideas, says Martin Smith, who specialises in technology and innovation at PA Consulting. That leaves a final problem of how to gauge what is – or will be – a success. Here consensus eludes the experts. Even Drucker framed the appraisal of innovation performance as a series of questions and admitted that it came down to “assessment rather than measurement”. Which gives us a final, overarching definition of innovation: the throbbing headache the chief executive takes home at the end of the day. 评析：团队的进步源于成员的创造力迸发与团队成员的协同。有价值的创造力是一个有竞争力的企业前进的动力，管理者首先予以成员充分的发挥空间（just like google etc. )，空间应是管理者圈定的方向和期待的创造力可以能够产生的价值。没有方向的创造是失去团队基础的、失去一个团队的单位行动是毫无意义的商业上的浪费、也是对协同原则的亵渎。 领导力（leadership）的美妙在于协调了企业发展方向与个人创造力之间的协调以及个体与个体、集体与外界的沟通。完美的协调是一首漂亮的三部创意曲，各个function逐一进展而不失去整体的协调性。管理者对突出而有利的表现应该予以充分的肯定和奖励；对背离团队前进方向的创造，首先对个人的努力肯定其次纠正和批评其个人相对整体的不和谐，也就是创造力失去了价值。失去价值的创造好比悬空的散文，漫无目的的前进只会拖累整体团队的进度。