On the 6th of May 1954, three thousand spectators watched a 25 year old British medical student run the mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Roger Bannister became the first man ever to run the mile under 4 minutes. The miracle four-minute-mile was considered by experts to be an impenetrable barrier until that historic day in May when Bannister proved the experts wrong and put himself in the record books.
I linked to this Wall Street Journal essay called the “The Genius of the Tinkerer” by Steven Johnson in my last post. It is an interesting piece which I will recommend that you read if you have not. He just released his new book last week called “Where Good Ideas Come from: A Natural History of Innovation” which l can’t wait to get my hands on. The Amazon reviews so far have been positive.
This is the last post in the creative leadership series.
A lot of leaders are always looking out for the next big thing in their industry. They check out what the competition is successfully doing and copy it shamelessly. This copy-cat syndrome is prevalent in the business world.
There is nothing wrong with studying what your successful peers are doing and there is nothing wrong with benchmarking your organisation against successful peers. The problem arises when you copy everything extensively. The idea of adopting everything that works in one organisation and replicating them exactly in your organisation can be dangerous. Leaders who adopt extensively realise that they don’t always get exactly the same successful results enjoyed by the benchmarked organisation. This is because there are a lot of intangible variables that are unique to that organisation which do not exist in their own organisations. Leaders should, therefore, always seek to take the context into play when they copy the good ideas or approaches of other successful companies.
I mentioned in my last post that leaders need to acquire fresh eyes to see the creative opportunities and solutions that surround them. Creativity is not always about running with the first solution or idea that occurs to you, rather, it’s searching for a better one. This is because most of the time, the first idea or solution is not usually the best one. It is hard work to dig deeper for more ideas because the natural default is to settle for the first ones. Creativity demands perseverance. Thomas Edison, the famous inventor of the light bulb and who is widely regarded as a creative genius, said that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”. This also applies to creativity. Creative leaders may make it look easy but there is a lot of sweat and toil involved.