Stanford Executive Briefings: Creativity in Business

Creativity in Business

Michael Ray, Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, condenses the lessons of his popular class, Personal Creativity in Business, for a business audience. He describes how to use four tools—faith, absence of judgment, observation, and questions—that can release creativity in your enterprise, sidestepping potential pitfalls and opening up opportunities.

Leadership for Innovation

Professor Hill explains that leaders at many high-profile and innovative companies have built communities of people who are both “willing and able to innovate.” They develop willing teams by pulling people together with a shared purpose, values, and rules of engagement.

Garage-Based Innovation

The drive to invent that Bill Hewlett and David Packard shared when they launched HP in a garage decades ago is critical to organizations today. As we shift from a knowledge-based economy to a creative economy, innovation-driven companies will be the leaders. Fortunately, says Phil McKinney, creativity is a skill that can be practiced and learned, and he shares his “FIRE + PO” process for tapping human ingenuity.

Creating Infectious Action

Brand development is shifting from an advocacy marketing model (why one should buy a brand) to an ambassador model (how you can participate in the brand). Social media offers a platform that can rapidly transmit brand messaging to an audience while letting the audience participate in the message.

Creative Thinking

Lynda Curtin gives you the tools to generate fresh ideas quickly and systematically. Using the proven techniques of lateral thinking, provocative operations, concept extraction, and random entry, she engages you in a powerful ideas-generating process that will give you something useful to take back to your job.

The Entrepreneurial Process

Investors today are once again looking very closely before putting money into new ventures. Entrepreneurs have to be more prepared to make their case for getting a new idea off the ground. Using her own experiences as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture capitalist, Magdelena Yesil walks you through the steps necessary to achieve a liquidity event, including identifying a winning idea, recruiting a team, choosing financial partners, and establishing the right business development relationships.

Idea Hunting

Arriving at new ideas does not require genius. Andy Boyton explains that to become an effective idea hunter, be receptive to creative inspiration from unfamiliar or unusual sources.

What Drives Phenomenal Success?

According to Colleen Barrett, success comes from an idea that is so simple, nobody quite believes it: customers return because they like the experience and they like the way they are treated. Her guiding rule is to hire on attitude and then train for skills, seeking individuals who will take the business—but not themselves—seriously.