From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part III

This post is the third of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world of business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.


In part I and part II I wrote about how to foster and capture creativity. In this last short post of the series I want to stress the importance of correctly communicating creativity. Noone will care about your life-changing ideas if you they do not understand what you are trying to say.

Communicating Creativity - Translate your ideas into suitable language
Innovative ideas are often not easily explained to other people. If they were, they were most probably not being labeled as "innovative ideas". If you do not want to be ignored or ridiculed as a strange nerd, dreamy fool or incomprehensible stranger you better start communicating your ideas in a langugage that is understood by your audience.

Communicating Creativity in Music
I will never forget when organ player Dennis Montgomery III told drummer Victor Lewis in a jazzaar-project I was playing in: "Hey man, I need that center block country church gospel feel!" Of course noone of the Europeans knew what a center block country church is, let alone how they play gospel music there. Victor however, was right on it. By using an analogy Dennis communicated much more clearly than if he said something like: "Could please give me a snare on three and eights on the hihat?" While of course we were not playing center block country church gospel he could wrap his idea of the tune's groove into highly effective and understandable language. At least for those knowing how gospel music is played in center block country churches :-)

Communicating Creativity in Business
The principle of communicating creativity is the very same in business as it is in music. Before you tell somebody about your new, disruptive, ground-breaking innovation take a minute to reflect on how to sell your idea. Is he a number's guy? - Say something like: "My hypothesis is XY, given that assumption we should change our product to Z, which would cost approximately X." Are you talking to a social media enthusiast? - go with: "Hey, I've seen Foursquare and Gowalla adopting XY. Maybe we should follow the same principle by doing Z". For rather emotional people try: "Hey, I think XY really hurts people's feelings. Shouldn't we change it to Z?" You want to sell your idea to a consultant? - Better say nothing at all and prepare some slides instead.

What do you think of this post? Write a comment!


I do not yet know the topic of my next post. Please drop by in a week or follow me on Twitter!

From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part II

This post is the second of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.

In my first post I argued how creativity can be fostered by exposing yourself to stimulus. In the next few paragraphs I will continue my explanation of the three-stage process by introducing the concept of capturing creativity.

Capture Creativity – Record, record, record

Creativity does not work from nine to five like a “normal” office worker. Instead, creativity is more like a suicide bomber. It suddenly appears, explodes and then vanishes. Unfortunately, you can never know when it will reappear again. What you can do, however, is to prepare yourself for your sudden spark of creativity: Arm yourself with recording devices, notebooks or useful smartphone apps and stay prepared to capture your personal two seconds of creativity - come what may. (Compare this idea also with Robert Fabricant's (@fabtweet) notion of the externalization of ideas.)

Capturing creativity in music

In my few short years of casual playing and writing music in and for bands and orchestras one theme has reappeared again and again: If you have an idea - be it a melody, a chord progression, or a couple of lyrics - you should record it immediately. "Recording" takes different forms whether it occurs in a group context or in an individual context: When we improvise in my band we always have a recording device running, be it a rather old-fashioned MiniDisc or an iPhone. This allows us to capture creative moments and then listen to them individually, refine them and finally write down important parts. 

Turning to the individual context, if you are on your own and you have a cool idea you should write it down immediately too, before it disappears. If you are interrupted by a phone call or an important e-mail you better start multi-tasking than forgo a potentially disruptive idea. (Here I apologize to all those people who had phone conversations with me while I was writing down a song ;-)). If you do not have pen and paper at hand there is another trick used by many musicians I had the opportunity to talk to: Call yourself at home and sing the tune onto your answering machine (in the 21^st century you can also record it onto your smartphone). It may sound weird but it is much worse to come home from a long day not remembering that one exciting melody.

Capturing creativity in business

During the last year I tried to apply the principle of absolutely recording spontaneous ideas to business. First, I was struggling because I missed appropriate tools (calling my answering machine did not seem quite appropriate). Nowadays I think there are two ways to make use of spontaneous creativity in business. The more bohemian one is the good old Moleskine, the techie way is to use Evernote on your smartphone. Both are very effective!

The first and foremost requirement, however, is to have the discipline to write down even seemingly bad or unimportant ideas that spark spontaneously. Some ideas are gems that need to be polished to recognize their beauty, some ideas are just crap. Still other ideas might not be useful now but can turn out to be important later in your life. By writing down all ideas you make sure you do not miss the gems, while you can still get rid of the crappy ideas later on. The initial concept for this blogpost sparked when I was traveling home from university. Although I did not have time to write down the full post I still could jot down the most important ideas using Evernote. Usually, it is worth taking 20 seconds to write your thoughts down. Furthermore, it might lure at least some people into thinking that you are a quite creative person!

What do you think of this post? Write a comment!

In part III I will write about how to communicate the ideas you have recorded to others. Follow me on Twitter and I will let you know when it will be posted!

From music to business: How to foster, capture and communicate creativity – Part I

This post is the first of three posts to present some creativity-related beliefs from music and how to transfer them to the world business. While I am neither a professional musician nor a business consultant or a remarkably creative person these ideas might be inspiring for some of you.

“Some people are creative, some are not!” – “I’m just not a creative kind of person.” – “You cannot learn creativity, either you are creative or you’re not.”

I have heard these statements dozens of times, be it in dark and muggy rehearsal rooms, clean and flashy offices or in crowded lecture halls. While there is a certain truth in the notion that some people are more creative than others I believe that certain elements of “being creative” can be learned, applied and mastered. While this belief originates in my musical passion as a casual pianist and songwriter I think the principles can also be transferred to the world of business. In my view, the effective use of creativity can be achieved through a three-stage process; its steps are “foster”, “capture” and “communicate”. This post presents step I – “foster”.

Foster creativity – Expose yourself to stimulus

In his book “On Intelligence” Jeff Hawkins defines creativity simply as “making predictions by analogy”. It is “mixing and matching patterns of everything you’ve ever experienced or come to know in your life”. He also gives advice on how to foster creativity, namely by letting your mind wander in order to find “a pattern that is analogous to the problem you are working on”. While this is advice on how to increase the probability of a successful match you can also try to foster creativity by exposing yourself to different stimuli (or “patterns” in the language of Hawkins).

Fostering creativity in music

Improvising jazz musicians achieve a delicate balance between developing an idea and reacting to “input” from the rhythm section and other fellow musicians thereby creating whole new melodies. One of my favorite examples is pianist Keith Jarrett who used the gong of the Cologne Opera as a starting point for his famous improvised "Koln Concerts". When we are creating a new song in our band we usually jam for one or two hours and keep reacting to each other’s different inputs or “stimuli”. Only then we arrive at a song idea that is really “in the pocket”. In a musical context emotions can serve as a huge stimulus for songwriting or composition too. Use them!

Fostering creativity in business

Exposing yourself to stimulus is rather straightforward in a business context. I love to read books, go to conferences, read my twitter feed or just talk to people (or brainstorm). In every one of these instances a myriad of ideas are generated and immediately thrown into the paper bin. But from time to time an idea is really good and useful. In choosing the topic of books, conferences or talks I believe there is an inverse relationship between “probability of creative transfer” and “innovativeness of new idea”. The farther away from your original discipline a topic, the harder it is to transfer insights to your domain of work. However, when it happens, chances are that it will seem quite innovative. As always, try to strike a health balance!

A word of caution

Exposing yourself to stimulus can be quite a lengthy, fragmented and time-consuming activity. I remember leaving our band rehearsal cellar after four hours of intense jamming without the emergence of a single idea worth this designation. I am quite sure most of us had the same experience with lengthy brainstorming sessions in a business context. Therefore, the most important bit of advice is: Have fun! There are so many ways of exposing yourself to stimulus, do not waste your time with discouraging activities. Then, sooner or later a decent idea will come to your mind. What you do then, is the topic of my next post!

What do you think of these ideas? Write a comment!

I am currently writing part II, follow me on Twitter and I will let you know when it is done.

Book Review: The New Capitalist Manifesto

I just finished reading The New Capitalist Manifesto by Umair Haque (@umairh), a very inspring book I must say. Let me share some thoughts.

The book in a nutshell
With his book, Umair Haque (@umairh) continues the journey he started on his Harvard Business Blog to provide us with a blueprint for business that is fit for the 21st century. Having in mind that more and more money does not make us more and more happy he envisions a capitalism that stops throwing at people more and more useless stuff and thin value. With "thin value" he means value that is fully loaded with negative externalities such as environmental distruction, exploitation of labor or adverse health effects for consumers. He instead provides us with five tools for creating thick value, these are:

1. value cycles instead of value chains
2. value conversations instead of value propositions
3. philosophy instead of strategy
4. completing a marketplace instead of protecting a marketplace
5. betters instead of goods

Why you should read it
As a regular reader of his blog I have been quite skeptical of his theories for a long time. Often because they were lacking hard facts and uncompromising evidence. However, in The New Capitalist Manifesto Umair Haque (@umairh) provides us with a rich set of examples of what he calls "Constructive Capitalists". While - obviously - this is no undeniable proof, it uncovers the inner mechanisms of a capitalism fit for the 21st century.

Why it might help
Mankind knows how to overcome the steepest sustainability challenges we face - water scarcity, greenhouse gases, pollution etc. Countless scientific and hands-on papers have been written on all those problems. However, very little work has been done on how to overcome change resistance. A recently published paper entitled Change resistance as the crux of the environmental sustainability problem by systems engineer Jack Harich puts forth the hypothesis that it's change resistance that we have to tackle now. By showing how to create value from sustainable business this is exactly where Umair Haque's (@umairh) book might contribute.

Currently I'm reading "Universal Princinples of Design" by William Lidwell (@williamlidwell), Kritina Holden and Jill Butler (@jillkb).