The successful creative business leaders who speak to our classes don;t strive. They apply themselves to a task for the sheer joy of doing it. It is in this sort of effort that you, too, can experience your inner creativity.

In our Stanford classes, we recommend this: Get to work on something (almost anything) productive, with the simply (even foolish) confidence that the work that’s in front of you is part of your answer.

It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. I already can sense the next crisis coming around the corner. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. We must accept it, just as we accept the weather. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.
The truth is, as challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it. If those assertions sound familiar, that’s because I used them to kick off this book. There’s something else that bears repeating here: Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

This finding makes perfect sense. Creative work requires that your mind feel a level of freedom. If part of what you focus on is whether or not your performance will get you that big check, you are not in that open cognitive space where the best ideas and most innovative possibilities reside. You do worse.

Psychologist Teresa Amabile has studied creativity for more than forty years. She says, if you want to kill creativity, insist that people standardize their work methods, spend as little time as possible on every task, have as few failures as possible, and explain and justify how they spend every minute and dollar. Imaginative people, because they live in a cognitive minefield, do poor work when they are forced to be fast and efficient and to avoid mistakes. If they aren’t constantly struggling, feeling confused, failing, and arguing, and trying, modifying, and rejecting new ideas, they are doing it wrong.

... a 2005 study finds that creativity flourishes in environments, such as Broadway shows, that are more network-oriented than hierarchical. So there’s always tension between creativity and operational efficiency.