A company's most important asset isn't raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It's creative capital--simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. But how do you accommodate the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process while increasing efficiency, improving quality, and raising productivity? Most businesses haven't figured this out. A notable exception is SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. SAS makes Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year. The company has enjoyed low employee turnover, high customer satisfaction, and 28 straight years of revenue growth. What's the secret to all this success? The authors, an academic and a CEO, approach this question differently, but they've come to the same conclusion: SAS has learned how to harness the creative energies of all its stakeholders, including its customers, software developers, managers, and support staff. Its framework for managing creativity rests on three guiding principles. First, help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions. Second, make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminate arbitrary distinctions between "suits" and "creatives." And third, engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products. Underlying all three principles is a mandate to foster interaction--not just to collect individuals' ideas. By nurturing relationships among developers, salespeople, and customers, SAS is investing in its future creative capital.
George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, Latour has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. Latour does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Stern sit in on developers' meetings and accompany the sales force on client calls. He takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Stern never seems really to take the bit. In fact, Stern considers Latour's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What's more, she is spread too thin. Yet, when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--Latour asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. In R0409A and R0409Z, four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice-president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.
George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, Latour has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. Latour does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Stern sit in on developers' meetings and accompany the sales force on client calls. He takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Stern never seems really to take the bit. In fact, Stern considers Latour's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What's more, she is spread too thin. Yet, when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--Latour asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. In R0409A and R0409Z, four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice-president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.