Some slow posting lately, but lots to read on creativity elsewhere on the web. Here's a few of my recent favourites.
Creativity and Lawyers
Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball in the US, and a lawyer by education, wrote a commentary on how he changed his own views about creativity as it relates to business.
“If a client came up with what we saw as a creative solution to a business problem, it was often our job as lawyers to explain why that route was illegal. In business, we saw creativity as the effort to do — often indirectly — what should have been done directly. In that world, a “creative” answer was not the admirable, straight answer.”
Creativity and Teams
From Edward Glassman’s book, Team Creativity At Work II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best, some interesting thoughts in this article on teams and creativity. Specifically, that the single biggest factor to enable people to be more creativity: other people.
“The biggest factor that helps people to be more creative, according to about half of 450 people I have surveyed, is "other people." Items like time, challenge, and freedom occur at a much lower frequency. Rewards are hardly mentioned. Conspicuously absent are customers and vendors, who usually want to help. One person wrote: "The biggest help to my creativity is when my boss leaves town."
Creativity and Solving Problems
While I can’t exactly account for the background of its author on an online news database, I do agree with this commentary from a news syndicate in Hawaii on the power of problem-solving, and more so, I like the simple definition of creativity.
“The intelligent solution to a problem seems to involve more than trial and error. It often requires a fresh insight based upon a sudden shift in the way the problem is viewed. Creativity always is the answer to a problem.”
Creativity and Accounting
Here’s something I never thought I’d read: an article in favor (correctly!) of “creative accounting”!
"If you think about it, I bet many of you are positively creative every year, month, week and day. You have to find ways to track and get the accounting right on new business transactions. You are asked to find ways to change the old methods of doing things in order to track more transactions, more accurately with less labor. You are asked to find better, faster ways to report the results of the business so that management can make better decisions quicker. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. CPAs need to be creatively accurate.”
