News & Updates:

Like the website?
Recommend Us To a Friend

Why Be Creative? - Part 6

All those predictions, of course, affect companies which make products. But they will also affect companies which service, dis­tribute, advise, and finance. These predictions add up to a com­pletely new and changing character for American business. It will not only be the manufacturers themselves who will be affected and have to make changes, but their attendant suppliers. And the successful adaptation to the changes will be in the hands of busi­ness executives. Right there, we have still another problem: al­though our total population is expected to grow by 25,000,000 by 1965, the best estimates indicate that our "future executive group"—men in the twenty-five- to forty-five-year age bracket— will decrease by 600,000. With expanding businesses to care for, the caretakers are going to be extremely shorthanded. And this will mean still more new problems in all areas of management: human relations, processing, marketing, labor relations, research and development, and personnel.

What all this adds up to is a crying need for more creativity from our business and government management. We need more men at executive and management levels who, instead of trying to "go by the book," have learned to use their imaginations to solve our problems. "The book" for the dynamic change years just ahead of us hasn't been written yet!

Now there has been, in recent years, an increasing amount of talk about the need for more creativity to help us cope with and solve the problems we have. Business, science, and government today need all the ideas they can get. This is usually admitted by even the most conservative managers. But very little observation of business is necessary to conclude that business, as yet, has done relatively little about getting anywhere near the full potential of creativity from either its leaders or its workers. As a matter of record, in the midst of the 1958 recession, when business was bad and businessmen should have been looking for new ideas and imaginative problem solutions, two major national conferences on creative thinking—aimed at the production of ideas—had to be canceled for lack of registrants. A third just barely made the minimum registration needed to break even! It seems to be a case of "After you, my dear Alphonse."

But in any business or other type organization, the creativity must come from the top. Top- and middle-management men must set the example. Or, if an executive does not have the inclination or the ability to become a top "idea man," he must at least acquire enough knowledge and understanding of the creative processes so that he can keep minds around him open to the rewards of crea­tivity, and will not, himself, inadvertently block or discourage fresh or different kinds of thinking within his organization.

Related terms include business process management system and small business management an entrepreneurial emphasis.