For most of them, the daily challenge to 'do their best' is a gruelling and fiercely competitive scenario. After all, creativity - the ability or power to create - is a mystical thing. 'To create' means to bring something into existence - but what kind of something? Whether it's a new product or a new campaign, will it be something of extraordinary, enduring quality or something transient and expedient?
Enter Korean Professor W Chan Kim and American Professor Renee Mauborgne, both ranked as two of the world's top business thinkers, fellows of the World Economic Forum at Davos and a string of other credentials. They use a structured methodology to unleash creativity in businessmen and bureaucrats. Their view: "When most people think of creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship, they tend to feel threatened because all these require risk-taking ... For them to reach into pure creativity, the risks would seem too high."
So the professors have developed a comfort zone and framework in which conservative people can learn to create and innovate in a commercially relevant way. Their views on value creation and innovation are timely.
Value innovation, they point out, does not mean improving the factory and reducing costs. It is about completely changing the way you do things.
For example, Cirque du Soleil took two industries - circus and theatre - and merged them. By doing so, it leap-frogged traditional circuses, captured a new adult audience, all at a price point many times higher than any traditional circus.
Value innovation is really about challenging strategy assumptions, redefining market boundaries, and making the competition irrelevant - rather than competing on established ground. It is all about creating new market space and encompasses the whole value chain - from product, service, delivery and costs, all the way to pricing.
Achieving value innovation does not hinge on being the first in the field.
The Sony Walkman, they said, wasn't actually cutting edge in its technology.
It was a creative marriage of Sony's existing stereo cassette machines and portable tape recorders of the time that led to unprecedented buyer demand.
I've always believed that people are born creative, but need to develop a personal methodology to release their gift. While universities or polytechnics teach us formulae, structures and elements of craft, our creativity is largely dormant and intuitive. The way we harness and release it, the way we make creative connections and solve problems will determine our success. And here, inspiration plays little or no part. Creativity has to become habitual. That's why we have to learn how to switch on our creative powers on demand. And if that means changing the way we work and think, so be it. It's an investment worth making. By overhauling our personal creative methodology we can achieve that other Holy Grail: resilience.
Resilience, the ability to shrug off rejection and go back to square one and start again, and come up with something even better, is the cornerstone of creativity. Resilience, not inspiration, is the most sought-after commodity in today's marketing communications landscape.
After all, if athletes could only perform when they were inspired, we'd have no Olympics.
