A Frequent Flyer's Guide to Innovation

I should open by being making clear that this post is not about imaginative ways to secure upgrades or avoid baggage or other fees….  It is, rather, about a range of ideas related to innovation and creativity experienced during a busy recent stretch of flying. Travel, of course, is generally marked by the kinds of situations often embraced by leaders wanting to foster greater creative production or excellence: engagement with unfamiliar situations and people, regular opportunities to make fresh choices and connections, a willingness to explore and uncertainty and the unknown.  During several flights since last month, though, I had various experiences explicitly about innovation, creativity and even leadership that prompted further reflection.

1. Keep Climbing

A current TV commercial for Delta Airlines shown on-board flights opens with black-and-white images of historical aviators and a voiceover declaring the need to celebrate these pioneers not by ‘looking behind’ but, like them, ‘looking beyond.’  This ‘Aviation Leaders’ entry in the ‘Keep Climbing’ campaign was created by award-winning agency Weiden + Kennedy.  Its presentation of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart and first astronauts to walk on the moon is moving and held up as prologue to the continuing and forward-looking innovations of Delta.   Interestingly, as the comments on iSpot make clear, the commercial has been viewed alternately as inspiring but also as offensive to some, who interpret the treatment of these heroes as disrespectful (http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7IKp/delta-airlines-aviation-leaders).

2. Sky Magazine

The traditional communications outlet, creative and otherwise, for airlines is the in-flight magazine.  Delta’s paper offering, Sky, like most of its competitors, is now also available online: http://deltaskymag.delta.com/.  The September 2013 issue is conspicuously focused on creativity and brands.  The covergirl is Heidi Klum and the story of her current projects reveals an obvious focus on (personal) brand communications.  Other content extends this emphasis, for example, an article on ‘channeling American style to Asian markets’ with profiles of brands like Red Wing Shoes and Pendleton clothing.

Several of Sky’s regular features speak to the novelty and encounters with the unfamiliar that can define travel.  The ‘Wheels Up’ section offers a blurb about a cave bar in Croatia and in ‘Creative Commons’ showcases the original graphic design work of Austrian Albert Exergian and Milan’s ‘Couture Culture.’  The ‘1 City/5 Ways’ section, this month about Hong Kong, reminded me of Edward de Bono’s famous six hats approach to creative ideation by looking at the city through the eyes, respectively, of culture vultures, hipsters, people with kids, foodies, and jetsetters.

As it happens, the same issue even has an ‘In-depth Executive Education’ section on ‘The Enlightened Leader’ that uses some of the authentic leadership ideas of Bill George, author of True North, to address the need for effective leaders to identify and use their own values to guide them.  Interestingly, a box in the article featured an interview with Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School faculty member who leads the module there on marketing creative industries.  In Sky, she discusses Lady Gaga, whose case is featured in Elberse’s forthcoming book, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking and the Business of Entertainment (MacMillan; http://www.amazon.com/Blockbusters-Hit-making-Risk-taking-Business-Entertainment/dp/0805094334).

3. Fashion’s Lessons

Besides movies, TV shows, games and the moving map tracking flight progress, TED Talks are now available as part of Delta’s in-flight entertainment.  Obviously many of these talks, both from TEDGlobal and TEDx local events, address innovative behaviors and ideas.  So it is unsurprising that among Delta’s selections are several that directly address the challenges and opportunities of creativity and creative leadership.  One example is the provocative Johanna Blakley, whose ‘Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture’ from 2010 explores the opportunities of an open creative process and culture: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Specifically, Blakley uses fashion as a basis for contrasting both the originality and revenues of copyright protected and non-copyright protected industries – and ultimately advocating greater creative collaboration and sharing.

4. Daily Visual Inspiration

A new entertainment offering aboard Delta are brief videos from coolhunting.com, the website that is ‘synonymous with inspiration’ in all things creative: http://www.coolhunting.com/video/ .  I already receive Cool Hunting Daily updates and have enjoyed and learned from the many online profiles.  Like TED talks, a selection of the videos are now available on Delta flights.  Among the half-dozen viewable on a recent transcontinental flight were 4-7 minute films of such creatives as decoupage plate designer John Derian, tintype portrait studio Photobooth, custom ski-maker Zai, and Roy Denim’s handmade jeans.  I particularly liked the story of Lisadore, the passionate maker of one-of-a-kind Comme il Faut tango shoes in Buenos Aires.  While delivering something of the promised ‘insider look at their inspiration and process,’ the segments seem more generally to present matter-of-fact summaries of the origins and processes of these artists, designers and true originals.

5. Technology Update

On September 30, Delta announced that they were equipping 11,000 pilots with Microsoft Surface 2 tablets.  The move would replace the paper-based flight kits containing navigational charts and reference materials and carried by the crew and to take a major step toward the goal of a paperless cockpit by the end of 2014.  Trumpeting both the promised increase in efficiency and the environmental benefits of the move, their partners at Microsoft spoke directly about Delta’s ‘absolute commitment to bringing the best in technology innovation into flight operations’ (http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=2118).  A special ‘Keep Climbing’ segment was created to showcase the upgrade.

So much to consider and be inspired by.  Yet I found myself asking what are passengers to do with all this information and inspiration while at 30,000 feet.  Or to extend that beyond the flight itself, what passengers do once they land and carry on with the rest of their everyday lives.  Put more pointedly, can the insights of the TED talks or Cool Hunting vignettes or even ‘In-depth Executive Education’ offerings be taken off the plane and somehow put into practice on the ground?  Or are they minor and occasionally edifying amusements merely meant to pass time in the stratosphere, little more than an entertaining variation on the experience of a doctor’s office waiting room?

That may be a general issue for anything one does when flying.  However, with so much attention given over to creativity and innovation today, the prevalence of on-board content related to the topics I experienced begs further questioning.  In fact, stepping back from particular flights, and tales of creative daring, we might ask how to avoid merely being along for the ride of others’ creative or innovative work.  Recall the viewers of ‘Aviation Leaders’ offended by what they took to be a lack of respect for early pioneers of flying.  Those commentators raise an essential question: What do we do with our innovation heroes?  Do they stand on their own, largely set apart from our own lives and the present by their historical achievements, or do we actively use their example as motivation for our own original attempts to break free of the past?

This is hardly an either-or question.  We can venerate creative heroes from the past or faraway while also striving to stand on their giant shoulders and climb still higher in the future.  Too often, though, the tendency to romanticize their accomplishments, to dwell in every detail of their journeys, can become an end in itself.  Our challenge accordingly becomes to internalize the inspiration they provide us and to use it to inform and drive forward our own innovative work.  Or as I asked myself at the end of a recent long flight, How do we step away from being passengers on the innovation journeys of others and become better innovators or creative leaders ourselves?

The Dark Side to Leading Creative Teams: Preserving Authority while Avoiding Destructiveness

The latest issue of the Creativity and Innovation Management journal features an insightful study of team leadership, ‘Authenticity and Respect: Leading Creative Teams in the Performing Arts’.  In it, Dagmar Abfalter, a researcher at the Innsbruck University School of Management, analyzes how the leadership of teams of creatives is conducted in two theatre companies in Austria and Germany.  She focuses specifically on the challenge of leading a team or company with diverse creative talents and expertise. 

Many of the conclusions are familiar.  Four traits and practices initially emerge as critical to effective creative leadership: 

• clearly defining success and then leading the team in achieving that goal, 
• exercising ethical and authentic behavior, 
• extending respect for talent and process, 
• and granting autonomy and freedom to individual creative and the team overall. 

Yet Abfalter also notes something else consistently present in the leadership of creative teams at the theaters – a fifth trait and practice she calls the ‘dark side of leadership’.  By this, she primarily means the imposition of hierarchy and the practice of authoritarianism.  Often, this dark side translates into expressions of narcissism or self-aggrandizement by leaders who can demonstrate a lack of respect for or even degrade their creative experts.  The unsurprising results of such treatment are strong negative feelings and emotions among creatives that undermine team production.

More unexpected is another finding.  Despite the negative outcomes, the vast majority of those on the creative teams did not want to change the hierarchical structures or diminish the authority of the leader that enabled the ‘dark’ behavior.  Team members didn’t propose entirely flat or circular team designs, for example, or having a leader without clearcut or meaningful authority.  Hearing this, we might reasonably conclude that hierarchy and authority can be used by leaders either positively or negatively and that a goal should be to reduce the latter in order to maximize the former.

For all of us as leaders of creative teams, though, Abfalter’s article also provokes a more valuable question: How can we develop and practice the more positive aspects of creative leadership like respect, authenticity and autonomy we aspire to without having to resort to rigid hierarchies or the destructive exercise of authority?  Part of what’s needed, of course, is vigilance about the potential dark side of every positive leadership trait or practice, for instance, of leaderly authenticity threatening to become narcissistic.  Also essential is resisting the regular temptation, even when driven by the best of intentions, to impose beliefs, standards, processes or practices on creative teams that increase dysfunction or stifle team effectiveness rather than empowering creative productivity and performance.

How do you resist the ‘dark side’ as the leader of your creative team?

Abfalter’s full article is available here.

Learning and Leading

For many leaders, the commitment to learning – both their own and that of their workers – is a given.  We all recognize the value of learning, after all, embracing different experiences and perspectives and encouraging opportunities for our teams or organizations to learn more about our work or ourselves so we can perform more effectively.  Yet in an age of ongoing change and disruption, how do we learn most effectively?  Beyond our ready willingness, what do we focus on in order to become better creative leaders?

We may cite various familiar examples to orient our own approaches to learning.  Steve Jobs, for instance, relied on a constant curiosity that provided learning and, in turn, the capacity to connect disparate elements, like applying the calligraphy he learned in college to computer fonts used first in Apple computers.  Creativity is “connecting things,” he memorably said, and to do so requires learning them in the first place.  

Likewise, as digital technologies have transformed businesses and relationships, it seems fairly straightforward that learning how to navigate them requires the regular refreshing of technical skills and social practices.  To empower us all to use these technological tools and platforms more effectively, we might highlight the dramatic re-working of various formal professional training and educational practices, from internal organizational training to external schooling.  Underpinning this re-training for others, leaders must themselves learn about how training should be designed and customized to maximize the learning of others.

Reflecting on the complexity of learning for leaders – and the necessity of their learning to learn better – yields several other helpful approaches.

• Learning (to Fail) Quickly

No one running a business today can afford to encourage his or her workers simply to fail.  Leaders must balance the benefit of learning with the sometimes very real costs of inevitable failures.  Too often, failing fast or often is parroted as a goal of creative projects or organizations without a fuller recognition of how learning needs to be built essentially into that process.  We ritually talk about the value of “learning to fail quickly,” in other words, when describing how to nurture innovation and creativity.  More apt, perhaps, is the way creative industry consultant and coach Charles Day puts it: we should leave out the middle two words in order to emphasize the more fundamental priority of learning quickly.

•       Adaptive Learning

Learning quickly requires sensitivity to the different kinds of failure that leaders and other creatives experience in business.  In other words, when focusing on failures, in particular, we need to adapt and learn differently from different situations.  While intuitively obvious, such a need for adaptability ultimately is about a general openness to learning regardless of specific situation.  For example, Harvard professor Amy Edmondson recently identified several different types of failure, such as those that are preventable in predictable scenarios or systems, deviations from system specs, and the unavoidable failures that arise in complex systems or scenarios.  Based on these types, leaders and organizations can better enable learning by (1) getting past blame, (2) establishing clear if varied reporting and communications systems processes, and (3) instituting consistent modes of analysis of failures, and (4) determining opportunities for experimentation.

•      Learning Organizations

Edmondson’s approach to enabling learning across different types of failure extends an important, two-decades-old emphasis on learning across the organization as a key to creating competitive advantage.  In 1990, Peter M. Senge published The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice ofthe Learning Organization, a groundbreaking call for thoroughgoing openness to learning at every level of organizations about operational improvements and efficiency.  For Senge, whose thinking was shaped partly by a fascination at the time with “Total Quality Management” and continuous process improvement, leaders were the designers, teachers, and finally stewards of learning.  As such, they need to be in service to the learning of others as well as the organization as a whole.  This service is powerful and far-reaching: learning across organizations is not so much about problem-solving as bridging the natural creative tension that exists between vision and current reality – and supporting leaders’ efforts to build creative cultures and collaboratively realizing organizational goals.

•       Learning to be Introspective and Self-leading

Analyzing and learning from the complexities of their organizations is essential for creative leaders but it is not enough.  Equally necessary is introspection and making self-reflection an ongoing leadership practice.  This is often particularly challenging for those already successful at analytical or creative work: such high potentials are often unprepared leaders who must develop new capacities at the speed of business.  One powerful approach to connecting reflection to action is the authentic leadership thinking of Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and author of True North.  In this and other works, George calls upon leaders to identify their core beliefs and values, as discoverable in their own life stories, as guideposts to leading richer and more successful lives, both professional and personal. 

Continual and thoughtful learning may be a cliché in life but it needs to be a concrete and very real driver of the work of effective leaders.  In his classic, On Becoming a Leader, management guru Warren Bennis captures well how knowing the world and knowing the self serve as cornerstones to a foundation for successful leadership.  Distilling so much of others’ insights on learning for business leaders, he recommends three active, ongoing steps:

1. Look back at your childhood, adolescence and use your experiences to make things happen in the present;

2. Consciously seek the kinds of experiences that will improve and enlarge you; and

3. Take risks, knowing that failure is vital and inevitable.

Valuable advice for creative leaders to embrace as a basis for better learning – and leading.

Creative Leadership Lessons from the Military

As part of a long-term research project examining the guiding tenets of creative leadership conducted with Doug Guthrie, we’ve interviewed dozens of leaders of creative businesses.  Many of these leaders were previously or remain successful creatives.   Besides illuminating the ways that effective creative leadership can be developed and sustained, one of the striking elements of these interviews has been the repeated references to military leadership – typically, as a contrast or foil to creativity-fostering leadership.  

Military leadership is hierarchical and paternalistic, these creative leaders say.  There is a lack of open-ended collaboration and reliance upon formal rather than informal authority.  Ultimately, military activities are defined, many observe, by creativity-stifling constraints and discipline.  The “salute point” at which decisions are made and discussions or collaboration end seems to fly in the face of the openness and even messiness required for creativity and innovation to flourish.

Of course, thinking historically, military leadership is among the most ancient of leadership forms.  That long view, combined with the diverse military activities across so many different societies today, means that references to “military leadership” can point to a wide range of incredibly varied practices.  The category is consequently an expansive one, which can contribute to partial understanding or attribution and even the creation of a “straw man” about which selective claims can be attached. 

The military itself, long committed to leadership training and practice, has increasingly engaged in reflection and research on the topic.  The United States military, in particular, has been active over the last three decades in re-thinking its leadership priorities and principles.  Several familiar examples of recent developments convey some of the breadth of their approaches.

·      VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, or Ambiguity

This acronym emerged in the 1990s to describe the capability to engage situations marked by changeability, lack of predictability, interdependent challenges, and preparation for multiple realities.  For leaders in the military and beyond, the doctrine underscores the importance of strategic decision-making, readiness planning, risk management, and situational problem-solving.

·      Be-Know-Do

Growing out of intensive analysis by the military of its leadership thinking, in part conducted with business management researchers, the Army Leadership Manual was revised following the end of the Cold War.  This shorthand version resonated with other models at the time that sought to combine attention to a leader’s character, competence, and action-taking (and which produced a best-seller: Be-Know-Do: Leadership the Army Way (Jossey-Bass, 2004).  The areas of focus here include individual values, people and teams, managing complexity, leading change, and leading learning organizations

·      COIN

Over the last two decades, and notably after September 11, the U.S. military developed a Counter-insurgency doctrine, with David Petraeus as its most prominent exponent.  As Fred Kaplan recounts in his exceptional historical account, The Insurgents (Simon & Schuster 2012), the evolution of COIN represented a paradigm shift in strategic thinking that was equally a story of leadership struggling to effect change in a sprawling and tradition-bound organization.  More specifically, and in keeping with the zeitgeist, it is a story about the challenge of ceding control and allowing for more adaptable and situational leadership.  Yet as Kaplan insightfully observes, the soldier-scholars like Petraeus who advanced this new approach overestimated its very sway and applicability: the COIN doctrine and approach ironically became for many a singular approach to war-making rather than one of many tools in the military leader’s kit.  

The emphases in these compelling models on self-awareness, adaptability, situational awareness, and engagement of complexity bespeak their important potential relevance to non-military leaders.  Still, I wanted to gain a fuller understanding of how military leadership operates and provides lessons for creative businesses, so I called Mike Zeliff.  Mike is eminently qualified to speak to the question: a former U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer who also served as the Corp’s Chief Marketing Officer, he went on to earn his MBA and Ph.D. in Marketing.  Today he consults to both the military and creative businesses. 

A major thread running through Mike’s astute observations about military leadership involves the opposition between generalists and specialists.  The uniformed services, he says, want an educated generalist good at war-fighting.  However, some officers undergo intensive and continuing training to become experts in specialty areas like cyber, technology, finance or regional studies.  General leadership skills and practice are not the priority area of the training that allows for professional advancement in these specialty areas. 

This emphasis has far-reaching implications, for example, in the opportunity to lead complex organizational change and drive innovation.  Innovation certainly happens in the military, but unlike in business, where leaders often try to change everything about a unit or organization, it tends to be targeted and often involves implementing an established tool or model.   Not only does the challenge of change exist as it does in nearly all organizations, as Mike explains, there is also in much of the military a more thoroughgoing resistance to change such as a generalist leader might promote.

Another point concerns the difference between military leadership on the homefront versus the warfront.  This was a contrast that several creative leaders had raised in interviews, though some defined the contrast in opposite ways, citing one or the other setting as where more open and creative leadership could be allowed.  For Mike, the warfront requires leadership – inspiring a team, demonstrating commitment, sharing troubles and challenges, and engaging in complex problem-solving.  The homefront, conversely, is a setting for management, that is, filling time, being sure to complete tasks, and simple problem-solving.

As these threads and points make clear, the boundaries between military and creative leadership are not nearly as clear-cut as many imagine.  In fact, while perhaps more easily associated with military practice, at least a handful of essential shared priorities would serve well those wanting to lead more successful creative talent, teams and organizations.  These include:

·     Appreciating and Engaging Diversity
To solve the most complex problems, leaders need to engage multiple, diverse perspectives.  The assumption here, essential to the successful operation of learning organizations, is that we have the most to learn from those who are least like us.

·      Appreciating Generalists
The diversity of experience and perspectives brought by generalists in mixing with specialists can spur creativity.  More fundamentally, awareness of core values and priorities remains a touchstone for effective leaders.

·      Decision-making
As a basis for fostering collaboration and creative excellence, leaders should employ deliberate, value-based, and well-communicated decision-making about processes, priorities and outcomes.

·      Managing and processing information systematically
With so much data and information readily available, there is an imperative to be deliberate and systematic about deciding how to manage conflicting and often overlapping including.  (These are not only strategic; they can be as prosaic as asking, What do you read?  And, How do you decide what to read?)

·      Practicing Discipline
This is not the stereotypically restrictive and rule-based authority but personal as well as team and organizational discipline, ranging from personal routines and sleep to consistent interactions with subordinates and collaborators.

·      Role modeling behavior and integrity
The expectation that military leaders need, through their integrity and actions, to serve as role models to their subordinates is fundamental.  Particularly in creative organizations where successful creative have been promoted into leadership positions, such role modeling can be extremely inspiring and powerful.

      

For additional, accessible insights on military leadership, see the Harvard Business Review special collection at http://hbr.org/special-collections/spotlights/2010/november and the Center of Creative Leadership White Paper on “Learning Leadership in the Military” at www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/LearningLeadershipMilitary.pdf