Let’s Get Crazy!

Charlie Parker is in business. That’s right. Bird’s Billie’s Bounce, once a touchstone of bebop, has lately found a second, alternate life. Played on videotape at seminars organized by the Center for Creative Leadership, the Bounce rebounds off the consciousness of assembled managers and executives, freeing them to pursue the goals of increased productivity and higher profits in a very timely fashion.

Bop on the bottom line is just one way of solving what Deborah Dougherty, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, sees as the crucial problem of the new decade: “connecting innovation with existing business.” In an era of global competition, fresh ideas have become the most precious raw materials. That means companies suddenly want their employees to think on their own, which calls for enormous change at firms where imagination was once considered a subversive trait. “In the past four years, creativity has been mainstreamed,” says Roger von Oech, who runs Creative Think, a Menlo Park, Calif., outfit specializing in shaking out new ideas.

“The hot topic right now is creative problem solving,” agrees Betty Edwards, director of the Center for the Educational Application of Brain Hemisphere Research at California State University, Long Beach. Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (copies sold: 1.4 million), has limbered the lobes of executives at companies as varied as IBM and Patagonia by helping them learn the basic perceptual skills required for drawing. Says Robert Kelley, adjunct professor of business administration at Carnegie-Mellon University: “The vital question American businesses face is to determine if they are going to require creativity on a regular basis. If so, they need talent in place, and no one knows how to do this very well.”

But the folks at the Center for Creative Leadership, with headquarters in Greensboro, N.C., are giving it a fair shot. At a seminar organized by Stanley Gryskiewicz, a director at the center, trumpeter Bobby Bradford plays Billie’s Bounce, then comments on his ensemble: “Everybody knows how many measures there are in this piece. Everybody knows the harmonic sequence. Nobody here is the leader. Everybody’s free to make any responsible decision, but we must also deal with surprise. Part of our training is to come out and dance on a slippery floor.”

Not everyone in the audience may be familiar with measures and harmonics, but in discussion groups that follow the presentation, almost every executive in the place knows what it’s like to go stepping on a slippery floor. “When you talk to business people about creativity in a corporate framework, there are normal barriers to understanding,” says Gryskiewicz. “But when you focus on creativity in another field, people say, ‘My mind’s looser. I can suddenly make connections.’ “

Some of the connections may not be so appealing to everyone. Creativity resists even the most creative definitions. “Trying to pin down creativity,” as a speaker noted recently at one of the Hallmark card company’s regular seminars, “is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” When the corporate back is to the wall, however, a wild swing can be the best move. “Desperation is a good motive,” says David Luther, senior vice president and corporate director of quality at Corning. “Customers came to us and said if we didn’t change, they’d go somewhere else.”

Corning gave its employees unusual freedom to think of solutions, backing off from hands-on management and organizing the staff into some 3,000 teams of up to 15 members each. One result: profits have risen 250% since 1982. “By the mid-1990s,” says Luther, “we’ll define good management as the ability to get out of the way.” Managers at Eastman Kodak decided to let the folks on the factory floor run the professional-film manufacturing unit. In 1989 the unit, which had run $1 million over budget, came in $1.5 million under. Such feats should be ballyhooed as an example to other workers, says Paul Schumann, a creativity consultant for Austin-based Technology Futures. His advice to managers: “Make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.”

Yet there is a fair amount of workplace skepticism about the whole subject. “Creativity is a negative word in business,” James Higgins, a professor of business at Florida’s Rollins College, says with regret. “It’s touchy- feely.” Experimentation in fluid management style is pretty much confined to less than 10% of all U.S. firms. “What makes anyone think that managements want more creativity?” asks Audrey Freedman, management counselor for the Conference Board, a business research group. “It’s uncontrollable. It’s rather unsettling to foster creativity and might even be self-defeating for a manager. The job of management is to control.” The adjustment isn’t easy. “A lot of managers are in role shock. They’re still fearful, apprehensive and unwilling to give up power,” says Jack Grayson, chairman of the American Productivity and Quality Center.

It was the absence of direct control and deliberate structure, however, that moved W.L. Gore & Associates, the 32-year-old outfit that introduced Teflon products, from a glorified mom-and-pop operation to a company with 37 plants worldwide. Gore’s 5,000 workers (“associates” in company parlance) turn out everything from electronics to a new dental product for gum regeneration. Associates are urged to take long chances. “At Gore,” says Jeanne Ambruster- Sherry, a biologist who works in the company’s sales-and-marketing division, “if you’re not making mistakes, you’re doing something wrong.” Vieve Gore, 77, who co-founded the company with her late husband Bill in 1958, puts it even more emphatically: “Our objective was to make money while having fun. If you’re told to do something, it’s not as much fun as doing what you want to do.”

In Minneapolis 3M encourages employees to devote about 15% of their work schedule to non-job related tasks, or doing “skunkworks” duty, as it’s known around the office. One skunkworking engineer came up with the idea for those neat adhesive Post-it notes while letting his imagination roam. This and other employee-generated brainstorms, from three-dimensional magnetic recording tape to disposable masks, have encouraged 3M to set a goal of 25% in total revenues from new products developed in the past five years. Currently those revenues are running closer to 30%, and 3M figures that nearly 70% of its annual $12 billion in sales comes from ideas that originated from the work force.

Hewlett-Packard is spending nearly two years and $40 million designing a “factory of the future,” scheduled to open in Puerto Rico next year, where computer-systems employees will be hired on the basis of their creative potential. Judging that kind of potential is the business of Ned Herrmann, whose North Carolina-based Applied Creative Services runs workshops on “whole-brain theory.” Herrmann, who spent 35 years at General Electric, a dozen of them as head of management education, has cooked up a test called the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which includes such queries as “Have you ever experienced motion sickness . . . in response to vehicular motion?” Herrmann maintains that people who are right-quadrant dominant, or more “artistic,” “emotional” and “spiritual,” are also more motion- sensitive.

Is this why Woody Allen might avoid roller coasters? Does Yo Yo Ma get carsick in a limo en route to the concert? That’s not the point, according to Herrmann. With H.B.D.I. results in hand, a manager can select people with different ways of learning, who together will form “a composite whole brain,” thus working more efficiently, and creatively.

At the University of Houston, Jack Matson runs a course the students have nicknamed Failure 101. They are encouraged to build the tallest structure possible out of ice-cream-bar sticks, then to look for “the insight in every failure. Those who end up with the highest projects went through the most failures. Whoever followed a fixed idea from the outset never finished first.”

Business baptism by pop stick may not be quite as cool as listening to Charlie Parker, but it still might be good preparation for the future. Already executives from companies like Chevron and Amoco have found themselves in two- day creativity seminars, working on problems like how to raise two candles to eye level in a dark room using only string and paper clips. Only Deliverance might be adequate preparation for one problem-solving ploy practiced at the Gannett-owned News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. Employees find themselves out at sea in a 25-ft. boat, often with only one experienced sailor on board. Says Madelyn Jennings, a Gannett senior vice president: “Some need to lead. Some need to follow. But they all need to get back to shore.”

“You can’t just order up a good idea or spend money to find one,” points out Hallmark’s Jon Henderson, director of the company’s Creative Resources Center. “You have to build a climate and give people the freedom to create things.” Better make that freedom and — remember — two candles, a string and paper clips.

Oh, by the way. Are you stumped? Think about the elusively obvious (like using the box the candles came in). Or maybe you’d better not go into the oil business. Or maybe you should just start listening to a little more Charlie Parker.