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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, to be creative,
you have to care about—be passionate about—what you’re doing.
Creativity and Vision
More recently, work by DeGraf and Lawrence, suggest a finer-grained view
[1]
into the characteristics and types of creativity. They argued that creativity “types”
could be clustered based on some combination of flexibility versus control and
internal versus external orientation. For the manager, their typology is especially
useful as it suggests ways to manage creativity, as in simply hiring creative
individuals. As summarized in the figure, their research suggests that there are four
types of creativity: (1) investment (external orientation with high control), (2)
imagination (external orientation with flexibility emphasis), (3) improvement
(internal orientation with high control), and (4) 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. Perhaps one of the most recent examples 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
[2]
number of new products to take business from AB’s stronghold markets.
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.
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