Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Software Businesses IT

Managing for Creativity 130

Posted by Zonk from the make-life-better dept.
theodp writes "After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies. But make sure they see this month's Managing for Creativity by Dr. Jim Goodnight, the still code-cranking CEO of SAS, the world's largest privately held software company." From the article: "Many academics and businesses have made inroads into this field. Management guru Peter Drucker identified the role of knowledge workers and, long before the dot-com era, warned of the perils of trying to "bribe" them with stock options and other crude financial incentives. This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Managing for Creativity More

Managing for Creativity

Comments Filter:

  • Dream on, sucker! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) * on Sunday July 17, 2005 @04:56PM (#13088720)
    Then along came "global resourcing" and the concept of "bribing" knowledge workers at all became unnecessary and said knowledge workers learned to be grateful that they still had a position at all.

    Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic. Maybe if you have the name recognition of a Shawn Fanning and someone wants your name to bootstrap their venture capital process, but not if you're Joe-Average-Buying-Four-Dollar-Milk guy.

    Today's "crude financial incentive" is "not being downsized".

    And to continue harping on the ridiculousness of such an article in an outsourcing world, I have to ask - when you're outsourcing for one tenth the salary, do you really expect any of the outsourced people you're managing to be "creative"? I've worked with a number of them and however they may be in their personal life, when it comes to the job they're paid for, they are anything BUT creative.

    This guy is one of those idealistic dreamers who has the misguided notion that you can employee people, treat them well, encourage them to be creative and non-comformist and original and not ditch them for the lowest bidder and somehow run a successful company in the long term. Learn a thing or two from today's top public-CEOs and start laying people off. Be a man! Send out some reduction notices! Cut some salaries! Freeze hiring and raises across the board! Freeze available training and education! Put the fear of outsourcing into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap. In fact, it is downright un-patriotic to treat his employees like he is doing and promote those communist labor-friendly, creativity-inspiring warm-fuzzy propaganda ideas.

    Completely off topic - what a name...Jim Goodnight! I can see the Abbot and Costello sketch for it, now...
    • Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic.

      Actually, if all employees were given stock options, and not just 1 share or some token, I bet there would be less outsourcing, or if there was, it would be less painful.

      If I had 4000 shares of Walmart stock, and I worked for them as a programmer, I would feel much more incentive to work harder, because the better my company does, the better the stoc

      • Re:Dream on, sucker! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
        Yeah, but employees know that options are worthless until they are fully vested. And if your dipshit of a CEO fuckwaggled the stock price down 95% sot hat what was a good million in options when you were hired was now worth less than the one-ply you wipe your ass on in the company bathroom, why would you even care about options?

        Plus, while options from WalMart might not be so bad, you'd be insane to take options as any manner of compensation in the tech industry these days.

        • Re:Dream on, sucker! (Score:2, Interesting)

          by cduffy ( 652 )
          Not all options take time to vest. I've got retention options, which take time to vest and go away 30 days after my employment terminates -- but then I've got compensation options, which are vested the moment I get them and stick around even if I leave the company.

          And yes, I'm one of those people who's doing the insane thing and taking options in lieu of compensation at a tech company. There's a pretty decent chance I'll come out of it well, though -- and if not, the existant-though-small paycheck was enou

          • Re:Dream on, sucker! (Score:2, Insightful)

            by hax4bux ( 209237 )
            blah, blah, blah. My life is great, don't you wish you were me. blah, blah, blah.

            My name is "hax4bux" and I've been contracting for 13 years. I want the money and I want it now. I hope you get rich, but I bet you don't.

            I've had this conversation over multiple contracts, how I should share the vision and work for less because "we're all gonna be zillionaires". Golly, such a generous offer. I'll stick to invoicing you each week, and you don't have to worry about sharing your precious stock pool.

            Oh, y

            • My life is great, don't you wish you were me

              Hey -- I'm making lousy money and being paid mostly in lottery tickets, and I didn't make any attempt to hide that. Thing is, I'm happy/motivated -- and getting employees into that mental state without excessive outlay is kind of the whole point of this article, no?

              Oh, ya. I've contracted to a few startups (the ones w/funding) and that "dipshit CEO" is routinely a sociopath who doesn't give two hoots about you as long as he gets his way.

              Yah, my last

            • Right on. The only company worth working for and "sharing the vision" is the one you own. Other than that, cash works just fine.
              • The only company worth working for and "sharing the vision" is the one you own.

                Well, that's what stock-based compensation does. I own (or have options to buy at negligible cost) a sufficiently large chunk of my employer as to give me a quite substantial interest in its success.
      • And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.

        Maybe they would have kept you around a bit longer if you weren't so uncooperative and unhelpful? We get consultants in all the time where I work, and it never cost me my job. My manager would be none too pleased if I just snubbed them and left them to rot, though.

        • Maybe they would have kept you around a bit longer if you weren't so uncooperative and unhelpful? We get consultants in all the time where I work, and it never cost me my job. My manager would be none too pleased if I just snubbed them and left them to rot, though.

          This may be true and you may have a point however while it hasn't happened to me I've heard too many tymes about how a person was told to train someone else only to be replaced by that person once they were trained.

          Falcon

      • And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.

        And what would you feed your family and yourself with, those stocks? Bet dividents wouldn't cover the loss of salary, so what then flipping burgers? Perhaps a new career in medicine as a doctor or nurse perhaps, with all those baby boomers reaching retirement someone w

    • Re:Dream on, sucker! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by asr_man ( 620632 )

      Put the fear ... into your subordinates or you're going to end up on the garbage heap.

      If the kind of organization you want to run is one where the employees do what they do out of fear, you're welcome to it.

      The rest of us will just do our best work, enjoy it, and placidly take the next step with our carreers when management starts serving that flavor of Kool-Aid.

    • The day the big faceless outsourcing companies in India figure out how to nurture employees for creativity, that's the day we have to fear.

      As of now, they seem to be blissfully unaware, and so we can compete easily on creativity. They produce crap in large numbers, and for whom it's ok, it's OK. We make the interesting and innovative things.

      And before you start flaming about how good the outsourced software really is, please give an example, and explain why it's good. All I have seen was useless crap, jus
      • And before you start flaming about how good the outsourced software really is, please give an example, and explain why it's good. All I have seen was useless crap, just like the stuff produced by big faceless corporations over here - unsurprisingly.

        I think you might have missed the tongue in my cheek. ;)

  • Article not really about stock options (Score:5, Informative)

    by robla ( 4860 ) * on Sunday July 17, 2005 @04:58PM (#13088730) Homepage Journal
    The article is really a reasonably interesting puff piece for SAS. While SAS seems like a very cool company (I'm guessing Google modeled themselves partly after SAS), the article stresses the reasons why you should offer lots of intrinsic perks (such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing), and doesn't talk much at all about avoiding extrinsic perks. So, if you are hoping to find the juicy bits about why stock options aren't very effective, well, don't look here.

    Incidently, if you saw the 60 Minutes story about SAS, you can probably save yourself the time of reading this article. There doesn't appear to be much that wasn't covered on 60 Minutes. However, if you haven't heard of SAS, it is a very interesting summary. Perhaps this is a more accurate teaser, quoted straight from the article:

    Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it's been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.

    Rob

    • Re:Article not really about stock options (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) * on Sunday July 17, 2005 @05:07PM (#13088796)
      I'm constantly amazed at the crappy "perks" corporations pay for that their employees couldn't care less about. For isntance, my company offers a concierge service. This service arranges for other companies and businesses to come in and try to sell the employees shit that they don't want. And they arrange for employees to have free access to very important online resources, like an article about writing a proper "thank you" note.

      I have a better idea. Have someone who gets my lunch so I don't have to leave the office for an hour and can have less stress dealing with traffic and lines and waiters. How often do I need to get my car fucking detailed for christ's sake? Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot. How about handling my personal mail and courier packages for me so I can just drop them off at a kiosk on my way into the office? How about offering career guidance or more education options instead of just paying lipservice to how important those things are and then putting a freeze on them to save money?

      I have never used any of the corporate services (mental health experts? medical phone number? car detailing? dry cleaning? thank-you-letter tutorial? discount on granola bars from a local vending machine supplier at a special sell-shit-to-our-capitive-employees-day?) and I don't know anyone who has. How about stop stuffing your offering full of shit just to say you offer a lot and start ovffering fewer, MORE VALUABLE services that actually make a difference.

      And you know, sometimes it's the small things. It's amazing what your workforce can do when they feel important and feel like they matter rather than constantly under the thumb of layoffs. Morale is important. Something as cheap as giving your employees free bagels and cream cheese once a week or donuts once or twice a week will make them feel like someone gives a fuck and like their contributions are valued. Otherwise they're likely to feel like they're just an unwanted burden and as soon as they can arrange to have you replaced by a cheaper drone, you're gone. Even if that's true, get the proper work you can out of the employee by installing loyalty... by treating them with little perks that make their work life enjoyable. After all, they probably will be spending at least 35% of their entire lifetime in your office...
      • I could point you to a certain company in Ohio that I interviewed at if you want. The work seemed interesting, they had daycare (and were getting certified to have kindergarten onsite), free cafeteria, free drinks, and some other things (dry cleaning, barber, massage).

        However, the interview process left me completely unimpressed with the *people* and the way that they acted.

        They contacted me for an interview (I'd never heard of them before that) and gave me a day to come up. I got there a few minutes ea

      • Re:Article not really about stock options (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Instead, how about having someone who can help me find a quality babysitter or refer me to a great place to take the girl out for a romantic dinner and maybe throw in a corporate discount to boot.

        Oh, dude. Dating the babysitter? And getting the company mixed up in it?!

        OK, you've got balls; but you are asking for trouble on so many different levels...

    • Re:Article not really about stock options (Score:4, Insightful)

      by techmuse ( 160085 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @06:33PM (#13089259)
      The reason that stock options don't work is that if you underpay someone, they will be unhappy. But if you pay someone enough, then increasing their pay has diminishing returns. Example. I pay a CEO $400,000 per year. They can afford just about anything they want. Now I pay them $5 million per year. Do they work harder or more intelligently? Nope. Same thing applies to other workers.

      On the other hand, if you make your workers *happy*, they will work for *less* money. See university profs for an example. So many people want to be a prof that universities can afford to pay less - but only because lots of people WANT those jobs.

      Happiness motivates. Too much money doesn't do much. Too little money demotivates.
      • But when the cost of living is high enough that the money in the bank does not increase while you're not going out to eat but once a week and not going to the movies at all and not taking the occasional day off to go up the coast, then I tell you that there's not enough money. The money is the only reason I work at the company. If I had $20M in the bank, I would not step foot in the place or even return the phone calls. Let's not forget that.

        I don't care about the perks. I'll pay for lunch. I'll pay for a

    • While SAS seems like a very cool company...

      Looks that way to me too. They support open source [sourceforge.net], for example.

    • such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing

      Those are not intrinsic. Intrinsic motivators are those that are intrinsic to the job - i.e. what the article is saying is that people work hard because their job is fulfilling or interesting.

      Of course making jobs interesting is difficult, which is why bad managers tend to be overly reliant on extrinsic perks and threats.

      However extrinsic factors (the most important of which is money) are ess

  • Creativity may come from within (Score:3, Interesting)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @05:00PM (#13088741) Homepage Journal
    But creative types would much rather work for a company that tried to 'bribe' them with expensive stock options then simply paid them a sallary and kept all the profits from their work for themselves.
    • Creative types probably aren't working in the tech field of your average corporation, either.

      Most positions within a tech company have nothing to do with creativity. Your job is to write something to spec, debug stuff or fix stuff. Outside of that, everyone is a secretary, security guard, janitor, human resources drone or middle manager. Outside of one or two guys who lead each product and the guys in your R&D departments, the amount of creativity that is expected or even desired is very minimal. To th
      • Programming isn't creative? Writing code is all about thinking outside the box, how can you solve x problem?
        • It's no more creative than being a caprenter, mechanic or any other number of standard professions. Sure, they all have to employ creative thinking (or, rather, problem solving) - but it's still within very rigid contstructs. And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.

          Creative problem solving is not the same as being creative. Almost everyone in the tech profession is paid to have creative problem solving
          • > And even when it comes to programming, most of the decisions are made by a small group and the grunt work is carried out by the rest of the crew.
            Only if you work for a faceless mega corporation...

            For the rest of us in medium sized organizations (1000 or so employees) - and particularly in the case of a non software company - there _is_ no rest of the crew.
            The few programming staff they have cover pretty much all the bases, and are therefore frequently responsible for all parts of the design and imple

        • Re:Creativity may come from within (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Programming isn't creative? Writing code is all about thinking outside the box, how can you solve x problem?

          Yes, you're right. Programming a solution for x problem is a creative act -- the first time.

          But the vast majority of "business problems" are the same damn thing over and over again. Over the course of a career, the first couple of years are interesting. You're learning new things, both about whatever business you're in and thing about programming most of your college professors simply didn't know

    • A better read: Hare brained, tortoise minded (Score:4, Interesting)

      by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @05:43PM (#13088984)
      Creativity does come from within, but most corporations build an environment that is not condusive to creativity/innovation.

      Task-oriented activities are suited to a typical corporate management model. You can monitor their progress set effective deadlines, describe them on papaer and outsource them.

      Creativity (including intuative thinking) does not respond well to any of these. Intuition happens on its own schedule and attemptng to drive it harder kills it. It has been often demonstrated that people under stress/pressure are less likely to find innovative solutions. Threats, direct (fix it this week or you're fired) or implied (downsizing/outsourcing) work against innovation.

      I know that from my own experience I very rarely make breakthroughs while doing what management would consider "work". I have figured out many things while doing something else: having a crap or a shower (no, not simultaneously), fishing, shooting hoops... perhaps they should pay me to do more of these.

      I don't know much about SAS, but from what I understand they are a privately owned orgainsation that really does take care of their employees. This must be a far lower-stress environment that a corp with a quarter-by-quarter driven approach that treats their employees as expenses/resources.

  • SHOW ME THE MONEY!!

  • Most important part of the article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @05:04PM (#13088772) Journal
    Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

    How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.

    I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.

    But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave. I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast! Contrast to the hours of 9am, which every second felt like an hour.

    If only the managment would have asked me, when is work the best for you. I would have told them, let me start at noon and stay late. But they did not want to pay overtime, they had fucked up rules about who could stay on company property after a certain hour, so everyone had to go home.

    • I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.

      But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave.

      When I came back to my current job, I accepted t

      • No-brainer jobs don't pay the bills.

        If you don't pay the bills, you don't have the time or resources to pursue those more interesting things in your "productive" hours.

      • Flexitime rules (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @06:37PM (#13089275)
        When I came back to my current job, I accepted the position on the condition that I could shift my schedule several hours forward from the usual "9-5". This not only makes me more productive when I am in the office, but let's me shave a couple of hours off my commute because I avoid rush hour. Win-Win for everybody.

        It's interesting that one of the most highly regarded "perks" in every survey of geek staff I've seen for years has been flexible working hours.

        At my current employer, we have quite a clever policy: the rule is you have to be in the office for at least 5 hours between 9am and 6pm every day, but other than that, you can work your 37.5 as you see fit, with common sense applying when it comes to organising meetings and the like. What this means is that you're guaranteed to be in the office for at least an hour of overlap with any of your colleagues in a given day, so you never miss someone completely. However, you can effectively take a half-day off without using leave, or go in before the morning rush and then leave mid-afternoon to pick the kids up from school, etc.

        I'd say most of the guys' typical hours are somewhere between 9:30-5:30 and 10:30-6:30. We also have quite a few habitual early starters and a few habitual come-in-at-lunchtime guys. There are even some guys who change quite radically from week to week or even day to day, such as the guy next to me whose fiancee works shifts at a hospital, or one of the girls who finishes early-late-early-late to alternative picking her son up from school with her husband.

        This is a great arrangement, and it was interesting that when we were bought out by a US corp a few months back, this was one of the Big Things everyone was adamant we would keep in the new contract. (We collectively made them rewrite it so we could.) Of all the other "perks" brought in by the corp, none has anything like the value of this one, and I'm not sure I actually use any of the others.

        • Re:Flexitime rules (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
          I worked at QinetiQ for a little while, and they had the policy that everyone had to be in between 12 and 2 (I think - something like that) if they were not claiming the day off (which you could do a small number of times a month if you had worked overtime, or if you wanted to use up some holiday time). This had the advantage that there was a time you could guarantee someone would be around if you needed to see them.

          Apart from that, you could turn up whenever you wanted as long as you kept track of how ma

    • How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.

      Nobody is naturally a "night owl". You are a human, you are supposed to be awake during the day and asleep at night. The fact that you your brain wasn't active until after lunch suggests that there is something very wrong with you. Here are some suggestions:

      • Eat breakfast. A big b
      • What kind of pipe land do you live in? 9 hours of sleep? That's for weekends!, FFS if I had nine hours of sleep every day i'd be a fucking firecracker. MMM glycerin high gets you every time!
      • I don't think you can put everyone in the same category. I wake up at around 8.30 am, shower, walk 20 mins to work. I have no breakfast, no lunch, no coffee just water & a couple of smokes during the day. Perhaps I'll have a bit of fruit a couple of times a week. Only on Friday afternoons do I go out for lunch - to the pub for a couple of pints. I get back home around 6:40 and either eat out (good food) or cook (properly) and stuff myself. This is washed down by 3 or 4 beers or a bottle of wine. I'
    • Your post rings hugely true. 9am-noon is "dead time". Been at a company for 1.5 yrs now. Despite a stack of great feedback from clients for the work I've done, I am currently dealing with a less-than-stellar feedback rating because my boss is hell-bent (at this point) at getting me in as much before 9am as possible. Man, I was swing-shift in the USAF, I was a night owl in college, and now Corporate America with all its kissass head-down follow-the-leaders is on my ass. I got dinged big-time for the 9:30 arr
  • After seeing some of the ideas management comes up with as a result of reading the Harvard Business Review, you may be tempted to hide their copies.

    A statement like this should be backed up with some facts. Otherwise it's just slander. HBR is a quality publication.

    • Well, technically, its written communication, which would make it libel, and its written communication of an opinion, which would make it not-a-crime. You have to make a false statement of a material fact which is also damaging to reputation for it to be libel or slander.
    • Yawn. It's not slander. It's not even directed against HBR. Its saying that the PHBs who read it often do stupid things afterwards. People read stuff like this, and somehow manage to find justification in them for doing whatever it was they intended to do in the first place.

  • Creativity needs no management (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Andrew Tanenbaum ( 896883 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @05:21PM (#13088874)
    Management sucks the creativity right out of you

  • TypeTalk. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "This view is supported by the research of Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile and Yale University's Robert Sternberg, which shows that creative people are motivated from within and respond much better to intrinsic rewards than to extrinsic ones.""

    That's because most creative people are introverts.

  • Lots of people are finally getting it (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We made the decision to go with a knowledge based economy a long time ago. It was forced on us by the realization that trying to protect the existing manuufacturing based economy would be impossible.

    Finally, the news is filtering down to those who make the day to day decisions. Recent best sellers have included: "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Christensen and "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Florida. (Our local city council has discussed the principles outlined in the latter work with regard to the pre

  • ugh (Score:2)

    by sbma44 ( 694130 )
    Shorter version:

    - pensions cost most than an on-site masseuse

    - the amount of salable intellectual property generated by your employees remains constant regardless of compensation. Just make sure you lock it up in their contracts!

    I know businesses exist to make money, but when I was last interviewing I viewed lots of in-office perks as a big strike against prospective employers. It's great if there's a foosball table in the break room, but not if the payments on it come out of my salary.

    Even worse is t
    • This may be the case for many companies, but SAS must be doing something right as they've consistently throughout their history been ranked by various different sources worldwide as one of the best companies to work in, and it seems to be something they are genuinely proud of and working hard to achieve judging from their website and from other public presentations.
  • *Instrinsic* rewards are simply doing the job for the love of it, anything else, whether financial based or massages, free drinks, etc are *extrinisic* rewards.

    The goal to high creativity, they say, is to try and de-emphasise extrinsic rewards linked to performance and instead create a culture of individual and group co-operation and autonomy (incl. slack time).

    There must be equity in the workplace for this to occur as well, otherwise workers will feel exploited.

  • Sure, stock options and bonuses are great and all but I've found I'm more motivated with the promise of free pizza for lunch.
    • Plus, you're more likely to die of bad health early, so they wont' have to pay out on the pension/401k front. And since you're a geek/developer, there's clearly no spouse or significant other to benefit from payments. They're scott free. :D
  • Whatever. Right. We creative people have no need of food, or bling, or wheels. Look. While creative people might be insulted (uh, they might say they're insulted), what we're really looking for is CREATIVE bribery. If the wife just drops her clothes, all she's getting is a sick look on my face. However, if she walks up to me, hands me a pint while wearing that cute red number she bought for this sort of thing, drops the dress, and has something kinky on underneath, then turns to show some tail and gen
  • Let us massage and reward your impressive creativity and self-importance with these magic "creative reward carrots", that stick that used to be in your ass is now called an intrinsic reward,. No those carrots won't pay for the sports-car and hairplugs or the summer house for sale next to ours (just listed for 1.5 million), just have the satisfaction that you are appreciated (as we are off to the summer house in the hamptons for the summer.)

    P.S. Carrots are good for your creative eyesight & our bottom

  • A place for managers to start... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OSXCPA ( 805476 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @06:00PM (#13089071) Journal
    Ok, you are my manager. Here's where you can start...
    1. Judge me by my work, not be how many hours I put in. You wrote the job description - if I can do the work you need in X hours, why should I hang around my cubicle for X+n hours, especially when I use 'extra' time to try and figure out better ways to do our job, which you ignore?
    2. Substance trumps form. This applies to not only work, but policy enforcement. Telling me that we use XX product, and because XX cost $YY and took KK consultants ZZ years to implement, it can't suck simply tells me the management team didn't know what kind of pit they were digging. My advice, to get out of the hole - stop digging first!
    3. I'll dress the way you want me to and conduct myself by your standards of 'professionalism', as long as you don't treat me like a three-year-old until I give you a reason. Then, just fire me - don't fsck with me.
    4. Don't fire people for exchanging their own information - i.e., if we want to talk about salary at lunch, that is our business, period, especially if we aren't on company property.
    5. Recognize the utter stupidity of office politics, and no, that jerk from Finance will not become less of a jerk if I learn to golf so I can make nice-nice with him. In fact, it will get you sued and me fired when I put a five-iron through his thorax.
    6. Keep the HR group away from me. I do NOT WANT another flier about the suicide hotline, nor do I care about our new marketing effort in Outer Namibia, and as far as Frank Jones, the new VP of Operations, New York, is concerned, re: promotion, well, good for him - I'll never meet him, and I don't think he wants to hear about my promotion either. Nor do I want to know about the class offered for "all professionals" held in San Francisco, that I can't go to because I am either not high up enough, or I don't sell for a living. You expect my work to be relevant to what we do. I expect the same sense of appropriateness and relevance as you do.
    7. I realize we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. If you are really worried about my taking advantage of proprietary information, by all means, call the feds. In the meantime, my wife's 401K is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS - we have no say in how it is invested, the trustee handles that. You should know that, being a large international bank.
    8. Before you give me any static about how overworked any/everyone is, and how short on resources we are, how about firing that useless sack of cr@p you complain about so loudly at after-hours work functions? I know he's been here 15 years, and it would make upper management wonder "how did this bag of cr@p last so long?" when you have to justify canning the id10t, but trust me, it will be worth it.
    9. Offering benefits and then implementing workplace policies that make it impossible to use them is the same as not offering them, except a whole lot more annoying. ("Gee, we would pay for your night-school classes, but we'll need you to work overtime for the next few months, then as needed after that - you're a professional, so I know you'll get the job done. What? No, we don't pay overtime or comp time, are you kidding?") Odd, how this sudden overtime need hit after I applied for tuition reimbursement...
    10. Mandatory fun isn't.
    Please note: The above have been aggregated from several different employers, so if you happen to know who I work for, and are a member of management, read #11...
    11. Respect my privacy outside of work. Unless I slander you, flaming me at work over what you think I may have implied is unprofessional - yes, that word can apply to management too!

    • I have to agree on pretty much all of what you wrote. I've seen it far too many times.

      One of the differences in my case would not be a suicide prevention hotline, but a homocide prevention hotline =]

      I am generally a calm and amicable individual. Heck, I even end up being a mentor and older brother to the team I'm on (which is amusing when you are younger than some of them), but once I hit my bullshit threshold (largely from certain managers I've worked with), I need to go to the lake in order to work of
      • once I hit my bullshit threshold (largely from certain managers I've worked with), I need to go to the lake in order to work off some frustration before I have to hide bodies.
        --
        Why is everyone so interested in my fishtank? And why is a German porn site linking to me? lol

        Um, is your fishtank at "the lake", by any chance?
        • lol no, my fishtank isn't at the lake.

          The lake is where I like to train. Just me, my blade, and an open, sandy beach.

          The fishtake referenced in my sig is a program that I worked on in college. It's a distributed simulation of a fishtank with a variety of fish. There's a more detailed explaination of it on my homepage under the Programs section.

          I get a lot of email about it, from people asking questions.

  • A little bit more about creativity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roffe ( 26714 ) <roffe@extern.uio.no> on Sunday July 17, 2005 @06:10PM (#13089128) Homepage

    Robert Epstein (last to receive a Ph.D. from B.F. Skinner) lists four strategies for generating creative output. These are

    • Capturing: The main thing that distinguishes "creative" people from the rest of us is that the creative ones have learned ways to pay attention to and then to preserve some of the new ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills. In other words, get a PDA and learn how to use it.
    • Challenging One way to accelerate the flow of new ideas is by challenging yourself--that is, by putting yourself in difficult situations in which you're likely to fail to some extent. A challenging situation is like an "extinction" procedure in the behavioral laboratory. We extinguish behavior when we withdraw the reinforcers that usually maintain that behavior. In challenging situations, a great deal of behavior goes unreinforced; it just doesn't work.
    • BroadeningIf you want to enhance your own creativity, take courses in subjects you know nothing about. Once a year, at least, take a course at a local college in the last thing you'd ever want to know about. Land's own breakthrough invention came about because of training he had in crystallography, chemistry, and other fields. The invention of Velcro, the modern theory of electron spin, and countless other advances were made possible because their creators had training in diverse fields. Steve Jobs recently made a point of how his training in caligraphy contributed to the intitial success of the Macintosh.
    • Surrounding Finally, you can enhance your creativity by surrounding yourself with diverse stimuli--and, even more important, by changing those stimuli regularly. Diverse and changing stimuli promote creativity because, like resurgence, they get multiple behaviors competing with each other. If you put a Mickey Mouse hat and pliers on your desk in the morning, your thinking will move in odd directions during the day. Call these items distractions, if you like; they are great reservoirs of creativity

    Sometimes, though, I wonder about the opposite--how can I learn to quit being "creatve" and just get the damn job done? It's not that I ever get any original brilliant ideas anyway--all really great ideas I have had, I've found out were conceived by somebody else before me.

    Anyway, here goes:

    Capturing creativity [findarticles.com]

    • Re:A little bit more about creativity (Score:4, Insightful)

      by OSXCPA ( 805476 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @06:19PM (#13089176) Journal
      A possible answer - if you are a singularly creative, producing person, hire a 'do-er' or team thereof who can take what you set up and explain and grind it out. Assuming you have the means to do that... Otherwise, try setting self-imposed limits, e.g., "I am not allowed to do (X very nice, imaginitive thing) until I implement (Y grindingly dull job done).

      Works for me, but YMMV.

      BTW - you may repeat great ides of the past, but hey - your timing might be better than the earlier implementation was. Think about all the stories of Steve Jobs seeing GUI, email and OO programming at Xerox PARC - he has even said, he didn't originate them, he implemented them and got them out for use when the time was right. (OK, many of the concepts were implemented by others along the way, but you get the point)

      Cheers!

      • Thanks for the advice!

        As you hint at, the story about Jobs being originally inspred by Xerox is in fact a myth. Jef Raskin, then at Apple, had worked with the ideas both as a professor and as an employee at Apple. The purpose of the legendary visit at Xerox was to see what Raskin had talked about in action. You can read all about it at Raskin's Site [raskincenter.org]

        • I stand corrected. I had seen an interview with Jobs where he talked about the visit and the "6 things he saw there" that he took, and he went to pains to say he only understood 2-3 of them at the time. I don't recall him mentioning Raskin, but that was probably my memory gone bad. Thanks for the reply and correction - and the Raskin link. Good reading!
  • Having spent the day looking at the R project and all its package, I think the Open Source R mops the floor with SAS products in terms of creativity.

    I just find it odd to hear SAS management talk about creativity vs. says Google, which at the moment seems to be a very creative company.
    • meaning that they get paid by tax money.

      That definitely has to be a job where the rewards are intrinsic to the creation of knoweldge, because the external rewards sucketh and getting grants and jobs is even harder.
    • R is an open-source knockoff of the S language. It's hardly a beacon of creativity, any more than Evolution, Mono or Rhythmbox is.

      That said, I agree about SAS. SAS is solid, certainly, but I doubt the word its users associate with it is "creativity".

  • Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative. Of course there is no need to give stock options to those who actually create the products, doing that would only encourage them to move on at some point. Make them chose between a decent work enviroment or money. They will chose the enviroment most of the time. Is there really any reason a person can't be creative and own a piece of what they create?
    • I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive. Like a catalyst. Creativity without such a mechanism cannot provide value to the market in a survivable way - the artists needs a studio to sell, or must create his/her own studio. What you call exploitation is one of the following:
      1. Bad negotiating skills on the creative side.
      2. Unwill
      • I can only assume you actually aren't in business for yourself. Maybe you've read an article or two in some B school publication about how academics view business.

        I disagree. "Business" is merely a mechanism by which a provider of a good or service works out how to sustainably provide same to the market in such a way that he/she/they can skim some value out of the process to survive.

        Business is all about dominating markets and extracting maximum profits. To do that you must raise prices and reduce cost. L
        • First, how "academics" view anything is not my concern.
          Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes.
          Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about reducing overhead - meaning, essentially, you need businesspeople to efficiently bring a product to market. So, do we like businesspeople for helping up get our products and services t
          • "Second, I have been in business for myself, and worked for others. I made money in both modes."

            So you had time to do sales & marketing, negotiate contracts and development. If you did then you must be one of the few. Most of the owner/operators that I know, including me, have a tough time doing all that at the same time.

            "Third, I am a little confused - you seem to argue that creatives drive the economy (I agree) but that "you can't eat creativity or sleep under a product" and go on to talk about redu
    • > Creativity is the engine that drives progress. Greed is the engine that drives business. Is it any wonder that the greedy are trying to exploit the creative.

      And creative greed is the engine that makes people rich?
  • When I RTFA, I noticed something that struck home - the author discusses the difference between a company being held 'accountable' by customers vs. shareholders. I've frequently seen good managers make decisions they knew were bad, because the stock market is fundamentally concerned with the lowest common denominator - it doesn't matter if you can make more money for the year by taking an action that will cause earnings to miss expectations this quarter, but the markets will punish you. Your customers, howe
  • I think this can work in some environments. Take me, for instance, who works for a non-profit DoD contractor. I get paid a decent salary and I am encouraged to be creative in my free time. Since the extra money from our contracts is rolled over into lab investments we have a significant pool of resources to draw from to be creative. I am allowed to use that money to buy things to experiment with. If I get an idea, I can try it out. That, for me, is fun. Not all of ideas work, but it sure is nice to h

  • 9-5 Creativity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Regnard ( 803869 )
    Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.

    I can't agree with this more. In my job where I actually use both sides of my brain, creativity just doesn't have a schedule. The best thing I could do is set myself up for a "creative spark" -- surfing the web for things I like, or look at what the latest, although surfing can only do so much.

  • Off topic... (Score:4, Funny)

    by xENoLocO ( 773565 ) on Sunday July 17, 2005 @07:21PM (#13089556) Homepage

    ... but damn, I would kill for his name at any party I've ever been to.

    Her: Hi, I'm Stacy...

    Me: Hi Stacy, I'm Mr. Good Night

    **slap**

    Ok, maybe not.... but the thought of it is cool.

  • $Money$ (Score:1, Funny)

    by militiaMan ( 672558 )
    Time and Money which are the same thing are also obviously the most important thing to any employee. This guy does not understand human nature. I make 50K as a software developer, and after taxes I only keep 30K. I have no home, I have no car, I have no stock options. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. I will soon have the money for a RV, and I will leave the U.S. I will run my business from Mexico in the next year or two from my RV so I won't have to work 60+ hours a week. I am tired of working for a bunch of
  • People still want and need bonuses and rewards, but I've found if the management thinks of money as a bribe then they think they are entitled to intrude on their people. Consider money the reward for success, not the price for someone's life-hours.

    SAS sounds like it has the idea for sustainability in knowledge based work. Respect the people with 16-20 years schooling and years of experience, the ones you worked so hard to recruit and interview. Require results and give them responsibility and authority.
  • Managing for creativity requires deep recognition of the fact that people are creators. Not only that, but the constant change of circumstances should be embraced as a fertile ground for creativity. And finally, it is very important to realize that the way people perceive reality is critical to them being empowered to be creative... and for their contributions to be valued. I write about this kinda stuff all the time - hopefully in a predominantly practical way - on my blog: Agile Advice [agileadvice.com].

  • Another idea (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Here's another tip: Stop trying to own your creative people. The most creative people are the ones who will be working for themselves in five years, and thus aren't willing to sign non-compete agreements, overly-broad NDAs, and contracts that say "we own everything you create whether you're being paid for it or not".
    • I agree with you. Non-compete agreements are really lame. An example: The web industry isn't really the biggest of fields of expertise but I've encountered an Non-compete agreement that really would make you change careers after the job to avoid potential litigation.

  • A Clean Code base! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moultano ( 714440 ) on Monday July 18, 2005 @12:00AM (#13090983)
    If you are developing software in any capacity, personally I think nothing helps creativity more than a clean code base. When the biggest thing you associate with implementing a new interesting feature is the crap you have to go through to get it interacting with everything else, you aren't very likely to come up with good ideas and act on them often.
  • Most of the time it feels like HBS is in a different universe from the way things are done in u.s.. Theoretically they teach these principles to managers who then manage us they way they're taught but it's never shown.

    Maybe HBS graduates go into fields other than technology and those fields are run like HBS teaches. Maybe technology leaders only come from Stanford and they have an opposite philosophy.

    Globally, Harvard seems more in line with the way things are done in India.
  • Don't waste time looking for creativity at work. If you have it great, but expecting it and being frustrated because it's not there is just a waste of time and energy. Companies don't care about your creative needs. They barely care about your work environment needs.

    After about 20 years in this business, I finally got a hobby. One that fulfils my creative needs. Now I control it on my own terms, one hundred percent.
  • That sounds a lot like what Paul Graham says in his "Great Hackers" essay. Although I think you could also sub other words for Hacker. (Programmer, Artist, etc)

    Essay
    http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html [paulgraham.com]

    Audio version read by the author:
    http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.htm l [itconversations.com]

Slashdot Top Deals

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

Close