The Myth Of Creativity

While I see value in the overall message, I think the author sets up a false dichotomy that somehow suggests there's a gulf between creative invention and pragramtic diligence. This is often something I run into - this notion that creativity equals flights of fancy, non-realist, ungrounded. On the contrary, creating, is in my mind, the wisdom to use the opportunities and resources close by, whether internal or external, to be productive in ways that exceed beyond what would be easy. Creativity and results can not be separated.

The author, Robin Hanson, has done some really great work in prediction markets. One of his papers directly led to the founding of Inkling Markets (YC06).

I sort of get the feeling that this article was indirectly referring to his involvement in the very creative, but highly politicized "Policy Analysis Market" which was a DARPA sponsored prediction market that might have included trading on topics such "a missile attack by North Korea" or "the overthrow of the king of Jordan."

Given how that went down, this article makes much more sense.

Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

I agree with him that mostly the bottleneck is not in idea generation, but in what you do with the ideas that you and others have. Unfortunately, he does not really address the "doing" part, except by saying diligence is good. Sure, but you also need audacity to push good ideas against resistance. You need an open mind to use the best ideas of others. To me diligence implies doing what you're told, but I don't think that will result in too much innovation, because that presumes that your boss understands the value of the new thing as well as you do, which is very rarely the case.

Words always get mangled in meaning when the enter the business vocabulary. "Leadership" is a good example. We don't really need that many Winston Churchills, and probably couldn't survive having them. Nevertheless we admire the quality of leadership want to emulate it. From what I have distilled over years in the corporate world, its practical meaning there has become "Having the guts to suck it up and get with the program."

So it goes with the word creative. No longer will we judge an artist to be creative by considering only the impression their work makes on the mind, without reference to the price of their work. Instead it will refer to the ability to generate unexpected profits with a limited set of resources by "delighting" the customer.

Exit leadership, enter creativity.

>Instead, the innovations that matter most are the millions of small changes we constantly make to our billions of daily procedures and arrangements.

This is true, but it's important to understand that whole categories of employment actually discourage and even forbid employees from adapting their own workflows to be more productive. Instead their workflows are imposed, often haphazardly or arbitrarily, from above - and often from people who have never actually performed the work they're managing. Workers who are denied any ownership of their own work are all but guaranteed to be cynical and unproductive.

Successful innovators usally knows that genius is 1% inspiration or creativity and 99% transpiration - hard work to implement the idea or several ideas until the successful idea and it's implementation is found.

The only time I was ever told to "think outside the box" it was because, in my arrogance and hubris, I stubbornly refused to believe or accept something that was completely untenable.

This author sounds boring.