Do we value creativity? I mean really?
For all the rhetoric about the age of ideas and the emergence of the Creative Class, I often wonder whether the main thrust of business truly (and I mean truly as in puts their money where their mouth is) values creativity.
I run into this most often in developing strategy. A strategy based upon creativity simply feels more limiting or limited. As I write the words, I imagine a hard-headed businessman reading it through his bi-focals and letting out a harumph.
It’s clearly limited Apple’s success because by and large most people don’t really believe they’re creative. We’re willing to see ourselves as productive, efficient, hard-working, organized and any number of other Taylorist adjectives to ourselves but we are loathe to call ourselves creative. We’re also loathe to describe what we do as an act of creation even though much of what is done in business is creation of some kind.
The separation of creativity from the average individual has been tied to the division of labor that occurred during the industrial revolution. As the tools of creation become more widespread and democratized, I wonder how long it will take for the label of creative to become more widely adopted?