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More About This Title Creative Strategy - Reconnecting Business andInnovation
English
People tend to think of creativity and strategy as opposites. This book argues that they are far more similar than we might expect. More than this, actively aligning creative and strategic thinking in any enterprise can enable more effective innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organizing for the future.
By considering strategy as a creative process (and vice versa), the authors define 'creative strategy' as a mindset which switches between opposing processes and characteristics, and which drives every aspect of the business. The authors draw experiences and cases from across this false divide – from the music industry, sports, fashion, Shakespearean theatre companies, creative and media organizations and dance, as well as what we might regard as more mundane providers of mainstream products and services – to uncover the creative connections behind successful strategy.
"Creative Strategy is a talisman for those looking to take a new path"
—Matt Hardisty, Strategy Director, Mother Advertising
"It has been said that business is a hybrid of dancing and calculation – the former incorporating the creative within a firm, the latter the strategic. Bilton and Cummings show how these apparently contradictory processes can be integrated. Their insights about how firms can 'create to strategize' and 'strategize to create' are informative for managers and management scholars alike."
—Jay Barney, Professor and Chase Chair of Strategic Management, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University
"In today's world, new thinking – creativity – is required to tackle long-standing problems or address new opportunities. The trouble is few organizations understand how to foster and apply creativity, at least in any consistent manner. This book provides new insights into just how that can be done. It moves creativity from being just the occasional, and fortuitous, flash of inspiration, to being an embedded feature of the way the organization is run."
—Sir George Cox, Author of the Cox Review of Creativity in Business for HM Govt., Past Chair of the Design Council
English
Stephen Cummings is Professor of Strategic Management at Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is widely published in strategic management; his books include Images of Strategy with David Wilson (2003) and The Strategy Pathfinder with Duncan Angwin and Chris Smith (2006).
English
Prologue: When Strategy Meets Creativity
1 False Separations and Creative Connections
Overcoming five false separations
Five creative connections for the future
2 What is Creativity?
1. Creativity’s Content: Innovation + a purpose to add more than individual value
2. Creativity’s Outcomes: transforming contexts and redefining problems
3. The Creativity Process: tolerating contradictions enables bisociative thinking
3 Uncreative Strategy
1. Creativity can’t be planned directly
2. Creativity requires bisociation, going between things, seeing from the edges, both/and rather than either/or thinking and can be thwarted by rigid classification
3. Creativity requires plurality
4. Creativity requires mistakes and accidents, or at least an acceptance of their value
5. Creativity requires slack
6. Creativity correlates strongly with an expectation that one should be creative
7. Imagery is more likely to stimulate creative thinking than language on its own
8. Creativity is often spurred on by a competitive tension
9. Strategy is often associated with heroic leadership by individuals
10. Strategic management, like management in general, has been more enamored with innovation as opposed to creativity
4 A More Creative View of Strategy
Strategy’s content: plans, patterns, positions, ploys, perspectives
The process of strategizing: designing, planning, positioning, learning, emerging, entrepreneuring, and so on
The outcomes of becoming strategized: orientation, animation, integration
5 Creating and Discovering a Creative Strategy Process
The ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY: Setting the Scene for Creative Strategy
PART I The Innovative Act: Discovery and Creation
6 The Bisociations of Strategic Innovation
The Importance of Being Innovative
Defining strategic innovation: Discovering and Creating the New and Original
7 The Six Outcomes of Strategic Innovation
1st Degree of Strategic Innovation: Value Innovation
The 2nd Degree of Strategic Innovation: Cost innovation
The 3rd Degree of Strategic Innovation: Volume innovation
The 4th Degree of Strategic Innovation: Market innovation
The 5th Degree of Strategic Innovation: Boundary innovation
The 6th Degree of Strategic Innovation: Learning innovation
8 Sparking Strategic Innovation
Diversity
Naivety
Curiosity
Urgency
Beyond best practice
The ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Act I: The Innovative Act
PART II Strategic Entrepreneurship: Dilettantes and Diligence
9 The Five Angles of Strategic Entrepreneurship
The force of a creative strategy
The five angles of strategic entrepreneurship
1st Angle of Entrepreneurship
2nd Angle of Entrepreneurship
3rd Angle of Entrepreneurship
4th Angle of Entrepreneurship
5th Angle of Entrepreneurship
The Cycle of Strategic Entrepreneurship
From Cycle to Interconnected Star
The strategic entrepreneur as a ‘diligent dilettante’
Creative thinking games for diligent dilletantes
10 Three Angular Journeys of Entrepreneurship
About a writer-entrepreneur
12 000 miles to market
Deciphering Codemasters
The ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Act II: The Entrepreneurial Act
PART III Strategic Leadership: Envisioning and Interacting
11 Leading from the Middle
All Roads Lead to the Middle
Route 1: The rise of the ‘knowledge age’
Route 2: Working with the ‘wisdom of crowds’
Route 3: Rediscovering of the importance of the ‘gut instinct’ and intuition
Route 4: Tipping rather than charging
Route 5: The power of networks and relationships
Route 6: From IQ to many Qs
Route 7: ‘Post-heroic’ leadership
Route 8: Strategy from the middle
12 The Strategic Leadership Keypad
Switching Positions: Introducing the strategic leadership keypad
13 Shifting Keys: Leadership as Envisioning and Interacting
1. Leading ugly: Billy Beane
2. Leading without ‘leadership’: Arsène Wenger
3. Leading by whispering: Bill Campbell
4. Reconnecting Leadership: Saatchi & Saatchi
From Strategic Leadership to Strategic Organization
The ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Act III: The Leadership Act
PART IV Strategic Organization: Focussing and Loosening
14 From Principles of Excellent Organizations to Organizational ‘Virtues’
SLT
Icarus, Aristotle and The Virtue of Virtues
15 Seven Virtues of Strategic Organization
The 1st Virtue: Integrating and fragmenting: Adaptive culture
The 2nd Virtue: Democracy and dictatorship: Meritocratic politics
The 3rd Virtue: Naïve and expert: Deutero-learning
The 4th Virtue: Subjective and disembodied: development from everywhere
The 5thVirtue Distracted and blinkered: A multi-tasking orientation
The 6th Virtue: Open planned and closed planned: Ambidextrous architecture
The 7th Virtue Static and flux: poised for change
16 Strategic Organization: Where Creative Strategy Ends (And Begins Again)
Organizing for creative strategy: Getting the particular balance right
Organizing Creative Strategy
The ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY Act IV: The Organizational Act
Sources and Suggested Further Reading
References
Index
