Fostering Creativity

Argues that with increasing competition, the nurturing of creativity is essential to promote differentiation and superiority. Therefore, senior managers need to devote much more time and attention to the key issues facing their businesses. They need to gain much more practical experience of the techniques used in continuous improvement and business process reengineering. There should be a shift away from memos and figures to diagrams and pictures so that priorities can be visualized rather than just analysed. A regular workshop setting is likely to be most beneficial with effective facilitation and a genuine willingness to challenge the status quo, rather than starting with the present, “paint” the ideal picture of the future. The task is then to bridge the gap by introducing “stretch” targets and radical thinking.