This returns us again to the central point of this section; the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.

One approach is to solve the specific problem or fill the specific need of an individual customer—not an individual customer group, but a single, solitary individual customer. The idea here is the same as above: if you invent a solution to the problem of a single customer, chances are there are other potential customers hidden in the woodwork that would also be interested in the innovation.

Yet, to have an innovative company, it’s also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, “If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.

You’re somebody’s customer, too—so talk to whoever is doing work for you. Show up with something of value or a pertinent question. Try to understand what their roadblocks are and what they’re excited about.

And talk to the people who are closest to the customer, like marketing and support—find teams who communicate with customers day in and day out and hear their feedback directly.

Come curious. And come genuinely interested. When you’re looking up and around, you’re not on a self-serving mission to understand if your company will fail and how quickly you should cut and run. You’re trying to understand how to do your job better. You’re getting ideas of how to help your project and your company’s mission succeed. You’re starting to think like your manager or leader, which is the first step to becoming a manager or leader.

You have to understand your customer’s needs and all the different ways you can address

them. You have to look at a problem from all angles. You have to get a little creative. And you have to notice the problem in the first place.

That last point doesn’t sound like a big deal. But it’s huge. It’s the difference between a startup employee and its founder.

Most people are so habituated to the problems in their home lives or work that they no longer realize they’re problems. They simply go about their day, get into bed, close their eyes, realize they left the lights on in the kitchen, groan and grump down the stairs, without ever thinking: Why is there no light switch in my bedroom that turns off all the lights in the house?

You can’t solve interesting problems if you don’t notice they’re there.