The Idea in Brief
Your company’s most important asset? Creative capital: the arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas turn into valuable products and services.
Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. But the process by which they do all this is complex and chaotic. How to manage your firm’s creative capital so it delivers maximum value—increasing efficiency, improving quality, and raising productivity? Apply software giant SAS’s three-pronged strategy, say Florida and Goodnight:
- Help employees do their best work by engaging them intellectually and eliminating distractions.
- Make all managers responsible for sparking creativity, removing arbitrary distinctions between “suits” and “creatives.”
- Engage customers as creative partners so you deliver superior products.
The payoff? SAS’s results say it all: 28 straight years of revenue growth. A subscription renewal rate of 98%. And an employee turnover rate of just 3%–5%, compared with a 20% industry average.
The Idea in Practice
SAS’s strategies for maximizing creativity:
Help Employees Do Their Best Work
Creative people excel when you present them with on-the-job challenges. Give each type of employee the form of mental stimulation that most engages him or her. Example:
SAS’s developers thrive on intellectual stimulation. So the company sends them to industry- and technology-specific conferences, where they hone their programming skills. It also maintains a healthy training budget so developers can keep up with cutting-edge technologies.
But as much as creative people like to feel challenged, they don’t want to have to surmount unnecessary obstacles, so SAS also strives to eliminate hassles off and on the job. Example:
SAS provides perks—including on-site dry cleaning, exercise, and medical facilities—that make it easy for employees to handle everyday errands and chores. These benefits make employees more productive and improve retention.
Make Managers “Creatives”
Ensure that all managers do hands-on work: You’ll send the message that everyone’s on the same team, striving to provide a superior product. When employees know their boss has actually done the work they do, they ask more questions, put more faith in their boss’s decisions, and feel comfortable discussing problems and pitching new ideas. Example:
SAS’s CEO writes software code for some of its products. The director of SAS’s on-site health care center is a nurse practitioner who sees her own patients one afternoon a week.
Managers can further spark innovation by:
- Bringing groups of employees together to exchange ideas
- Asking lots of questions
- Procuring materials that employees need
- Avoiding penalizing people for making honest mistakes
Engage Customers as Creative Partners
Ensure that people throughout your organization hear customers’ voices loud and clear. Customers will tell you why your company’s products or services aren’t ideal and how to make them better. And they’ll work with you to improve them. Example:
Every day, SAS gathers—and acts on—customer complaints and suggestions through its Web site, over the phone, and through annual users’ conferences. It prioritizes complaints and comments and routes them to the appropriate experts, incorporating as many suggestions as possible when developing next versions of software. It has taken action on about 80% of all customer requests.
A company’s most important asset isn’t raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It’s creative capital—simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. Professionals whose primary responsibilities include innovating, designing, and problem solving—the creative class—make up a third of the U.S. workforce and take home nearly half of all wages and sala-ries. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. That much is certain. What’s less certain is how to manage for maximum creativity. How do you increase efficiency, improve quality, and raise productivity, all while accommodating for the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process?
