Creativity and passion are of particular relevance to mission and vision statements. A simple definition of creativity is the power or ability to invent. We sometimes think of creativity as being a purely artistic attribute, but creativity in business is the essence of innovation and progress. Passion refers to an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction. Passion is also associated with intense emotion compelling action. We focus on the relationship between creativity, passion, and vision because organizational visions are intended to create uneasiness with the status quo and help inform and motivate key stakeholders to move the organization forward. This means that a vision statement should reflect and communicate something that is relatively novel and unique, and such novelty and uniqueness are the products of creativity and passion.
Creativity and passion can, and probably should, also influence the organization’s mission. In many ways, the linkages might be clearest between creativity and vision statements and passion and mission statements because the latter is an expression of the organization’s values and deeply held beliefs. Similarly, while we will discuss creativity and passion separately in this section, your intuition and experience surely tell you that creativity eventually involves emotion. And to be creative, you have to care about—be passionate about—what you’re doing.
Creativity
Relatively recent research suggests a finer-grained view into the characteristics and types of creativity.1DeGraf, J., & Lawrence, K. A. (2002). Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make It Happen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Creativity “types” can be clustered based on some combination of flexibility versus control and internal versus external orientation. As summarized in the following, there are four types of creativity:
- Investment (external orientation with high control)
- Imagination (external orientation with flexibility emphasis)
- Improvement (internal orientation with high control)
- Incubation (internal orientation with flexibility emphasis).
The first type of creativity, investment, is associated with speed—being first and being fast. It is also a form of creativity fostered from the desire to be highly competitive. An example of this type of creativity crucible is the beer wars—the battle for U.S. market share between SABMiller and Anheuser Busch (AB; Budweiser). Miller was relentless in attacking the quality of AB’s products through its advertisements, and at the same time launched a myriad number of new products to take business from AB’s stronghold markets.2Retrieved October 27, 2008, from http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/stories/2004/05/31/story7.html.
The second type of creativity, imagination, is the form that most of us think of first. This type of creativity is characterized by new ideas and breakthroughs: Apple’s stylish design of Macintosh computers and then game-changing breakthroughs with its iPod and iPhone. Oftentimes, we can tie this type of creativity to the drive or genius of a single individual, such as Apple’s Steve Jobs.
While big ideas come from the imagination quadrant, improvement is a type of creativity that involves making an existing idea better. Two great examples of this are McDonald’s and Toyota. Ray Kroc, McDonald’s founder, had the idea of creating quality and cooking standards for preparing tasty burgers and fries. While there were many other burger joints around at the time (the 1950s), Kroc’s unique process-oriented approach gave McDonald’s a big advantage. Similarly, Toyota has used the refinement of its automaking and auto-assembly processes (called the Toyota Business System) to be one of the largest and most successful, high-quality car makers in the world.
Finally, the fourth area of creativity is incubation. Incubation is a very deliberate approach that concerns a vision of sustainability—that is, leaving a legacy. This type of creativity is more complex because it involves teamwork, empowerment, and collective action. In their chapter on problem solving, David Whetten and Kim Cameron provide Gandhi as an example of incubation creativity:
“Mahatma Gandhi was probably the only person in modern history who has single-handedly stopped a war. Lone individuals have started wars, but Gandhi was creative enough to stop one. He did so by mobilizing networks of people to pursue a clear vision and set of values. Gandhi would probably have been completely noncreative and ineffective had he not been adept at capitalizing on incubation dynamics. By mobilizing people to march to the sea to make salt, or to burn passes that demarcated ethnic group status, Gandhi was able to engender creative outcomes that had not been considered possible. He was a master at incubation by connecting, involving, and coordinating people.”3Whetten, D., & Camerson, K. (2007). Developing Management skills. (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 185.
While no one of these four types of creativity is best, they have some contradictory or conflicting characteristics. For example, imagination and improvement emphasize different approaches to creativity. The size of the new idea, for instance, is typically much bigger with imagination (i.e., revolutionary solutions) than with improvement (i.e., incremental solutions). Investment and incubation also are very different—investment is relatively fast, and the other relatively slow (i.e., incubation emphasizes deliberation and development).
Management 2020 text remixed from multiple sources under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. View a complete list of original sources.
