In my own 2007 book Group Genius, I make many of the same points about how creative collaboration is often highly improvisational. But unlike me, Barrett is a professional jazz pianist and has even played with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. And Barrett was one of the first management scholars to note the parallels between improv and business: inspired by the management guru Karl Weick, he organized a 1995 panel at AOM, the annual management scholars’ meeting, and he contributed to an influential 1998 issue of the journal Organization Science. So I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time!

Barrett writes:

Jazz bands actually are organizations designed for innovation, and the design elements from jazz can be applied to other organizations seeking to innovate. Jazz bands…require a commitment to a mind-set, a culture, practices and structures, and a leadership framework that is strikingly similar to what it takes to foster innovation in organizations.

Since Barrett’s 1995 panel at the AOM conference, several business books have appeared that draw parallels between jazz and business. The first was John Kao’s Jamming (1996); there’s also my own 2007 book Group Genius, Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom, and last year’s book by Josh Linkner, Disciplined Dreaming. (And some others I’m forgetting about right now…) So what’s new in Barrett’s book? His treatment overlaps quite a bit with these prior works, but his contribution is to draw out the improvisation metaphor with seven principles in seven chapters:

1. Master the art of unlearning; guard against the tendency toward routine and structure. Deliberately disrupt routines.
2. Welcome complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, by learning how to make “affirmative moves” that drive the situation forward, trusting in the process of group emergence that something positive will emerge.
3. Perform and experiment simultaneously. What results is unexpected, and often is a “mistake.” Nurture a culture of enlightened trial and error. Embrace failure. (This one reminds me of design thinking.)
4. Aim for guided autonomy: just the right balance of structure and improvisation. Tolerate dissent and debate.
5. Jam and hang out. Organizations need to create room for jam sessions, to design for serendipity, by fostering “opportunistic conversations.”
6. Learn both soloing and supporting. Accompanying others, or “comping,” is a form of followership.
7. Leaders should practice “provocative competence”–incremental disruption that forces people out of their comfort zones, provoking “learning vulnerability”–moments when people are exploring the unfamiliar.

These are fascinating new concepts, perfectly targeted at business leaders who need to foster greater collaboration and innovation. As Barrett says,

This new era demands focusing on teams rather than individuals…. Leaders must master the art of learning while doing….build a capacity to experiment, learn, and innovate…engage in strategic, engaged improvisation.

This is an engaging and well-written book. If you’re drawn to the jazz and business metaphor, and you’ve enjoyed prior books on this subject, you should add this one to your collection.

First of all, Americans value creativity in others more than just about any other characteristic:

And although 83% of people say creativity is important in their job, a whopping 91% say it’s important in their personal life.

Fifty percent of people think creatively in pictures, only 34% in words. And 4% think creatively in sound…probably the musicians!

For you students and teachers out there: 62% say that creativity is more important to job success than they thought it would be when they were in school.

*If you follow the link below to the online article, you’ll discover that the survey is connected to a conference held on April 26, 2013, hosted by the MPAA, called “The Creativity Conference,” and you can watch video excerpts there (including of President Bill Clinton).

Jeffrey Kluger, “Assessing the Creative Spark,” TIME Magazine May 20, 2013.

Paul Torrance was one of the first-wave creativity researchers, who helped to found the field back in the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1950s, he developed the first version of his creativity test, which soon became known as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, or TTCT. This test continues to be the most widely used creativity test in the world–often used for admission to gifted and talented programs, for example. You can read more about this history in my 2012 book Explaining Creativity.

In the mid-1960s, Torrance argued that schools should teach creativity, and that curriculum for all subjects should be designed to foster creative learning outcomes. He even developed a series of curricular materials that teachers could use to help students be more creative. He was way ahead of his time–in the last ten years, education leaders around the world have been advocating for creative learning as a “21st century skill,” and I also believe that we need to do a better job of fostering creativity in our students.

He lived a long and productive life, most of it at the University of Georgia, passing on in 2003–and leaving part of his estate to UGA to fund the Torrance center’s ongoing research.

It was awesome to stand in front of the glass display case containing all of Dr. Torrance’s awards. And I wish I’d had more time to peruse his book collection, which lines the walls of the center’s conference room. It was a wonderful visit–to be surrounded by people dedicated to the study of creativity.

Creativity cannot explode if you do not have the ability to step back, take in what everybody else says and then fuse it with your own ideas. Theater is one of the most collaborative art forms, and you have to be able to absorb everything that people tell you….When I go into meetings with successful business people, I’m always amazed at how much they’re able to just sit there and absorb things and then make a really good decision.

Having original ideas is what makes you successful, if you know how to implement them. It’s a rare thing because some people have the ideas and other people have the mechanics, but they can’t do both.

You have to learn how to fail.

Perhaps my biggest study of group creativity was my study of Chicago improvisational theater groups. I learned that theater is truly an ensemble art form: the purest example of group genius.

*Adam Bryant, “First, make sure your idea works on a small stage.” New York Times, Sunday April 7, 2013, page BU2.

Colleges are now getting the message. Many of them are now requiring students to participate in creative activities, or to take courses in creative thinking, as writer Dan Berrett describes in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education.* Starting this Fall, Stanford will require all incoming students to take at least one course in “creative expression.” Students at Carnegie Mellon now have to satisfy a “creating” requirement, when they create a painting or a musical composition, or design and build a robot, or develop a creative experimental design. Both the University of Kansas and the City University of New York have recently adopted general education requirements that all students take a course in creative thinking. The University of Kentucky requires all 20,000 undergraduates to take a three-credit course in creativity.

The goal is to help students learn about how creativity works; about how to negotiate the twists and turns in the creative process; and to develop their own confidence in their ability to generate creative solutions. I completely support these curricular changes; after all, the 21st century is the creative age, and every career is going to require creative thinking (except for the repetitive jobs that are being automated anyway). Most graduates will change jobs multiple times; many of them will end up in careers that don’t even exist today. They need creativity, adaptability, and flexibility more than just about any other course  we might require.

There are lots of challenges to getting this right. First, creativity research shows that you get the best results when you teach creativity within the context of a specific discipline (rather than teaching one “general creativity” course). This means that if you want creative physicists, then your physics department classes need to be changed; if you want creative computer scientists, then the computer science curriculum needs to be changed. If you just add a three-credit creativity course, but then students get the same old memorize-and-regurgitate curriculum in their STEM classes, the creativity course won’t be able to overcome the uncreative STEM teaching.

Second, different departments on campus are likely to have different perspectives on what counts as “creativity.” The professors in the art school and the music department often associate creativity with the arts; but creativity is important in all disciplines, even in science and math, and especially in engineering. (The Engineer of 2020 report, by the National Academy of Engineering, starts with the sentence “Engineering is a profoundly creative occupation.”) If you’re taking a piano class and memorizing a composition by Beethoven for the piano, is that really creative? And what about a computer science class where you design a user interface for a web site? That certainly seems creative… but, what if you’re designing a new database algorithm for a large international bank? Isn’t that creative too? (Even though the soulless depths of a bank’s back office seem to be about as far away from creativity as one can get…)

This is one reason that I’m now studying how professors teach in schools of art and design and architecture. These professors have been teaching for creativity for decades, while at the same time guiding their students towards learning important discipline-specific skills and procedures. Their teaching is domain specific, which is perfectly aligned with creativity research. My hope is that by documenting this “studio model,” I can draw out important lessons for how to reform teaching in science, math, and engineering.

I’m glad to see that so many universities are responding to the need for greater creativity!

*Dan Berrett. “The Creativity Cure.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2013

The current education system does not produce people who are innovative. That makes it harder for the country to reach its long-term goal of building an innovative society.

The government in Beijing knows that entrepreneurship has driven the Chinese economy, and they now have policies in place–for example, to bring back Chinese professionals who attended university in other countries and stayed there. One policy offers a bonus of as much as $160,000 for those who return; and yet, since 2008, only 3,300 professionals have taken up the offer.

Some of China’s top universities are beginning to offer entrepreneurship education programs, of the sort that are now common in the U.S. thanks in part to the funding of the Kauffman Foundation, which has famously sponsored many “Kauffman campuses” where students can major in entrepreneurship and participant in business plan competitions, under the guidance of experienced local mentors. (My employer, Washington University, is a Kauffman campus.) Three of China’s most elite universities, Tsinghua and Peking Universities in Beijing, and Fudan University in Shanghai, have created incubator programs to help entrepreneurs develop commercial applications.

So what’s the solution for entrepreneurship in China? Schools and universities are an important part of the solution; many Chinese perceive their own schools and colleges to be focused on rote learning and not receptive to creativity and critical thinking.  One international business student chose to attend an English language university, run by Britain’s Nottingham University, specifically to acquire the “critical thinking” that her uncle says is lacking in Chinese graduates.

But colleges can’t solve the problem alone. Cultural attitudes need to change to value entrepreneurs. Venture capital is an essential component, and a business climate of open and fair market competition. Many would-be entrepreneurs give up after they realize the bribes they’re expected to pay, and the unfair advantages given to large state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The path to greater Chinese innovation is complex, but education is one of the core components of greater creativity and entrepreneurship.

*Bob Davis, 2013. “Chinese college graduates play it safe and lose out.” WSJ, Page A1, A10.

• Thank you for the irritation, We say no to sequestration
• We have major detestation, for your idea of sequestration
• Congress should have sterilization, when they thought of sequestration
• Hey we ask for dispensation, from your fast, called sequestration (you have to understand Lent to get this one)
• Congress needs some liquidation, they dreamed up this sequestration.

Hilarious!

*Elizabeth Williamson, March 20 2013, “Demonstration against sequestration has reasons, but few rhymes.” Wall Street Journal page A1. (Awesome headline, by the way!)

First, on Saturday March 16, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) is dramatically changing its patent system, from a “first to invent” to a “first to file.”* Under the old first-to-invent system, if you could document that you were the first person to come up with an idea, you got the rights to that idea–even if someone else had filed a patent for that idea first. So what’s wrong with that? It sounds logical: if you thought of it first, it shouldn’t matter that you didn’t run to the PTO before everyone else.

There are two problems: First, every other country in the world uses a first-to-file system, which means if you filed first for the patent on the idea, it’s yours, no matter who can prove they really thought of it two years before you did (from their lab notebooks or whatever). In an increasingly international economy, having our patent system align with the rest of the world is a big deal.

Second, under first-to-invent, imagine how complex the court cases get, when some inventor somewhere says that they actually thought of that idea five years ago. Then, lawyers are poring over old lab notebooks and reading hundreds of emails. It might sound simple: All you have to do is find the email that contains the idea on a certain date–but in fact, it always takes a lot of complex interpretation. Was this lab notebook sketch really evidence of the idea? Usually, it’s close but not quite exactly the idea that’s in the patent. Many inventors think their idea really was this idea, but everyone thinks their idea has a broader scope than it really does under patent law. Companies have been spending billions defending themselves against patent lawsuits, and this change is intended to reduce the litigation.

The second article** talks about copyright protection on sound recordings. The Library of Congress wants to convert their old (and decaying) sound recordings to digital, and then make these digital versions available to their patrons. And it turns out, that’s illegal for something like 177 years after the recording was originally made. The copyright protection even for the oldest recordings, made when the technology was first invented back in the 19th century, will not end until 2067 at the earliest. In Europe, in contrast, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their initial release.

The more I learn about IP law, the more I realize it’s a huge complicated mess. I’ve been impressed with my IP law colleagues, negotiating complex issues at the intersection of law, economy, and psychology of creativity (hence my involvement with the issue). But as I concluded back in 2007 in my book Group Genius, patent and copyright regimes today are too restrictive, and this is reducing societal innovation.

*Ashby Jones, “Inventors race to file patents.” WSJ March 15, 2013, p. B6

**Terry Teachout, “Copyright protection that serves to destroy.” WSJ March 15, 2013, p. D6

I was intrigued to find a marketing expert (sorry, branding expert) writing a book about innovation, but after reading Kaye’s book it makes perfect sense. For Kaye, successful branding and marketing depends on identifying the hidden links between observations, experiences, facts, and feelings–and when we do that, we uncover fresh and surprising new insights. She’s right: the psychological research likewise shows that the most original and surprising ideas come from making hidden and distant connections. The first epigraph in her book is Steve Jobs saying “Creativity is connecting things” (I quote the same epigraph in my new book, Zig Zag!)

Kaye’s book tells you how to identify and understand these hidden “cultural codes and shifts in consumer perception” with the goal of “catapulting fresh products to iconic status.” Every Chief Marketing Officer wants that! So how do we do it? Kaye identifies five “red threads”

1. Become better at observing and interpreting what’s around us

2. Take a fresh look at the past

3. Know what makes your market tick

4. Learn how to create a new “language” to make your product stand out, and yet also be universally understood

5. Persevere, review, and refine your ideas but without compromising integrity or core beliefs

I liked this book, because I am a psychologist studying creativity, and this brings a completely different perspective to the same phenomenon: How to engage in behaviors and habits that lead to consistent and deliberate creativity.

At the SNAAP conference here in Nashville, today’s lunchtime presentation was an interview with comedian Lewis Black, by playwright and lyricist Willie Reale. Lewis talked a lot about his career, and I was struck by how many zigs and zags he passed through before he became “Lewis Black” the famous comedian. Until the age of 40, he was a struggling playwright, doing okay in serious theater, but starving artist poor…his path to standup comedy was not at all linear. Check out these zigs and zags:

1. In high school, he loved theater, and decided he would go to college to study theater.
2. At UNC and then at Yale’s School of Drama, he followed this dream.
3. He moved to New York, and got a job as a bartender at a divey bar in the East Village. In exchange for tending bar, the owners let him book acts in the club, so he got experience and connections with the theater scene.
4. Eventually he moved to manage the West End Theater, where he stayed for eight years. He started introducing the acts, and gradually his introductions became longer as he gained confidence. After a few years, he was doing a special one hour stand-up on Saturday nights.
5. At the age of 40, still pursuing his career as a serious and respected playwright, he cowrote a quirky musical about the Russian Elvis Presley, filled with Cold War themes; it gained some attention.
6. It was 1989, and two weeks before the play was to open, the Berlin Wall fell. He and his cowriter had to add a second act to the musical in which the Berlin Wall fell; that took six months.
7. The revision was successful, and they were invited to produce the play at a respected theater in Houston.
8. Down in Houston, after several days and weeks of being treated badly by the management of the theater, one night he got really frustrated. To let off steam he went across town to the local comedy club’s open mike night. He did a 15 minute bit, and as he put it, “I killed.” On the spot, the owners offered him top billing and $1500 a week. That, he says, was the moment he decided to give up on playwrighting and become a standup performer.

This story is just like the zig-zag path that leads to successful creative innovation. And it’s not just Lewis Black’s career; this morning, Professor Steven Tepper presented data showing that creative careers almost always follow these unexpected twists and turns.

It’s fascinating that creative careers have the same improvisational, unpredictable structure, as the path that leads to a single creative product or invention.

My new book ZIG ZAG is coming out later this March; pre-order it here.