Stop Budgeting, Start Improving

Stop Budgeting, Start Improving

Pressure and Creativity

Short version: Apply the right kind of pressure on innovators

Long version: What doesn't motivate creativity will kill it

Another thing for the to-do list after finishing my study

Having completed a bit a bout the influence of social networks on creativity I think that I may be able to turn this into a speech or presentation built around the concept of 'El Dorado'. I hope I remember what this means when November rolls around...

What influences your creativity?

Here is what creativity research over the past six years has found could influence your creativity at work. These have all be used as variables in survey based studies.

Age

Attitudes towards creativity

Authoritarian Leadership

Behavioural integrity

Benevolent Leadership

Chinese culture

Climate for Creativity

Collaborative culture

Collective efficacy

Compensation systems

Conscientiousness

Creative performance

Creative Process Engagement

Creative role identity

Creative self-efficacy

Creative skills in organization

Creative time pressure

Creative work involvement

Cultural factors

Demographic factors

Education

Educational Specialization Heterogeneity

Emotional intelligence

Employee participation

Empowerment

Encouragement for creativity

Environmental uncertainty

Expectations for creativity

External environment

Extraversion

Extrinsic motivation

Feedback

Feelings of energy

Follower innovative behaviour

Freedom

Gender

Group

Group size

Group Type

Happiness

Harmonious passion for work

Hope

Includes relationship between employee and supervisor

Individual conformity (or autonomy)

Information exchange

Innovative culture

Intention to think creatively

Intrinsic interest

Intrinsic motivation

Intuitive cognitive style

Job Autonomy/ Job control

Job challenge

Job characteristics

Job Characteristics

Job complexity

Job type/ characteristics

Knowledge sharing

Knowledge stock (TKM)

Knowledge utilization (TKM)

Leader-member exchange (LMX)

Learning orientation

Martial status

Meaningfulness at work

Motivational support

Need for achievement

Need for affiliation

Need for power

Network diversity

Network size

Network strength

Neuroticism

Non-controlling leadership style

Openness to experience

Organizational cultural archetype

Organization size

Organization type

Organizational creativity

Organizational identification

Other factors

Perceived external prestige

Perceived organizational identity

Performance reward

Perseverance

Physiological availability

Polychronic tendencies

Positive Group Affective Tone

Positive psychological experiences

Prevention based behaviour

Proactive personality

Procedural justice

Professional Activity

Promotion based behaviour

Psychological empowerment

Psychological safety

Regulatory focus

Relational support

Relationship between peers

Relationship with customers

Relationship with employees (includes guanxi networks)

Risk

Risk propensity

Role conflict

Self-expectations for creativity

Social desirability

Stewardship behaviour

Stress

Strong tie networks

Strong tie networks outside team (includes outside team guanxi networks)

Strong tie networks within team (includes within team guanxi networks)

Structural empowerment

Structured processes (HRM)

Supervisory status/Rank

Support (or perception of) for creativity

Support for autonomy

Support for autonomy/centralization

Support for Creativity

Supportive culture

Supportive leadership

Systematic cognitive style

Task autonomy

Task conflict

Task feedback

Task identity

Task significance

Task variety

Tasks requiring creativity

Team age

Team centralization

Team Creative performance

Team creativity

Team diversity

Team emotional intelligence

Team formalization

Team life-cycle phase

Team trust

Team-member exchange (TMX)

Tenure in job

Tenure in team

Time pressure

Training strategies for creativity

Transactional leadership

Transformational leadership

Trust in employee loyalty

Trust in employee reliability

Uncertainty/ Role ambiguity

Value placed in formalization

Vitality

Weak tie networks

A big thank you goes out from me to Excel for helping me manage this stuff!

Productivity

A cheap shot as it's just a link to someone else's blog. I'm giving 'rise early' a really good thrashing at the moment.

Services quality and recovery on slideshare

The one presenation I did found that services quality and services recovery are better being run as separate sessions. The services quality and recovery presentations have been split and uploaded to SlideShare. You can find them at the links below:

• Services Quality
• Service Recovery

This represents some cyber-slacking as I should be wading through hypotheses.

Broken processes

Extreme positions are usually wrong but often have a component of truth in them. There's a good element of truth in this. "We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes, while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes." Fukjio Cho (張 富士夫) - Toyota

Service Management Overview on slideshare

The presentation has been put on slideshare.net. I hope this is a better solution than using google pages as a file store.

Work the system

A man was going up to bed, when his wife told him he'd left the light on in the garden shed - she could see it from the bedroom window. But he said that he hadn't been in the shed that day.  He looked for himself, and there were people in the shed, stealing things. He rang the police, but they told him that no officers were in his area, so no one was available to catch the thieves.  He said ok, hung up, waited a few minutes, and rang the police again. "Hello. I just called you a short time ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now. I've just shot them all." Within five minutes there were half a dozen police cars at the house.  Of course, they caught the burglars red-handed. One of the policemen said to the man: "I thought you said you'd shot them!" He replied: "I thought you said there was no one available.” An attention grabbing introduction from: “work the system”: employee creativity in the shadows by Feirong Yuan, Celile Itir Gogus, Richard W. Woodman

Study music

After many years of good services I am going to retire my current study music. Study music is what I put on when I study, it plays over and over again and the purpose of it is to fill in the background with something pleasant, not distracting, that reduces the distraction caused by random noise. I don't know how many times I have listened to Verdi's Nabucco but I have proved beyond any doubt that CDs just don't wear out no matter how many times you play them.

Proof proactivity works

What do these guys say about being proactive?

Gong, Y., Cheung, S., Wang, M., & Huang, J. (2012). Unfolding the proactive process for creativity: Integration of the employee proactivity, information exchange, and psychological safety perspectives. Journal of Management, 38(5), 1611-1633. 

Hypothesis 1: There is a positive relationship between proactive personality and employee creativity. Supported
Hypothesis 2: There is a positive relationship between employee creativity and newcomers’ career satisfaction. Supported
Hypothesis 3: There is a positive relationship between employee creativity and newcomers’ perceived insider status. Supported
Hypothesis 4a: Employee creativity mediates between proactive personality and career satisfaction. Supported
Hypothesis 4b: Employee creativity mediates between proactive personality and perceived insider status. Supported

What this says in simple terms is that if you are proactive you are likely to be more creative. If you are more creative then you are likely to experience more career satisfaction. If you are creative, you are likely to feel that you belong in any new role more quickly.

Being proactive and creative helps with career satisfaction.

Family is back

It's nice to hear how much the kids enjoyed their holiday, and there are a lot of photos.

Survival

Following on from the last post about ancient languages, the Emperor Claudius was supposed to have written a large history of Etruria using in the Etruscan language. It doesn't survive so the language is lost.

Many far more ancient languages have been rediscovered. Akkadian survived because it was written on clay tablets. Clay was used for practical reasons as the writing could be smeared off and reused. When ancient cities were destroyed, they were burned when both fire-hardened and buried the tablets ironically protecting them for future generations to uncover and decipher.

Deciphering a language is a case of having enough material, looking for patterns, and taking clues from known and surviving languages. For example finding known names in Greek or Hebrew and using the sounds to provide a clue as to how the language sounded.

Some languages I know have been deciphered are: Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian; Sumerian; Hittite; Old Persian. There's even a Mycenean Linear B Dictionary online (for those interested).

Many more recent languages (Etruscan, Palmyrene, Gothic) have been lost forever because of better and newer materials being used that just don't have the resilience of clay tablets.


Much of the information about our society (e.g. this text) would be lost if we lost the ability to produce electricity.

Clay tablets hold a tiny amount of information, whereas a hard drive (how long do they last and it needs special equipment and power to use) holds incredible volumes of information and they are both about the same size. The survivability of an information system seems to be inversely proportional the the density of information that it can hold.

Go and get those digital photos printed...

10 things you should do on linked in

Posted so I can remember where to find it: 10 things you should do on linked in.

The url trick works: http://nz.linkedin.com/in/graemekiyotoward

No change

I will have to admit that this is one of my favorite internet sites. My daughter loves this stuff, especially this one. I think I may have had it and this one loaded up as fonts on my computer at one point.

I wish this sort of information had been around when I was a kid. But as the internet has made and incredibly broad range of information available it has also made incredible amounts of meaningless entertainment available as well so there is more information but other things to fill in the time for kids these days.

The positive and the negative net out to no change I suppose.

Changing Education Paradigms

There was a very nice link to a YouTube video about Changing Education Paradigms that was sent to me by a colleague that formed the inspiration for my current research report. I have finally managed to include in the references - it forms part of the introduction and helps to provide context. Not sure whether a link to a YouTube video is going to be considered an appropriate reference in a a research report for a Masters paper.  I guess I'll find out.

My all time favorite reference has to be this (full reference below) that I managed to fit into an assignment about Service Management. Not because it was a way to buck the system but rather because human systems generally have more in common than not and that looking at other systems (or industries) can be very informative and inspirational.

Here's the reference: Weick, K. E., & Roberts, K. H. (1993). Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks. Administrative science quarterly, 357-381.

Innovation

Innovation = invention + implementation?

Probably more accurately:

• Innovation = Invention (Creativity) + Effort + Persistence
• Change = Innovation + More Effort + More Persistence
• Results = Change + Yet More Effort + Yet More Persistence

By the way

• Invention (Creativity) = Effort & Persistence (go read something about Thomas Edison if you don't believe this)

Short version is results requires effort and persistence whichever way you look at it.

Weird but convenient

It's very weird but I needed to refer to my own blog post to remind myself on the key attributes of transformational leadership. It was convenient though!

Damaged...

Everything is relative. I wonder who thinks this is me.

Working backwards

Short on time, a lot to do, today's post is this.

Roman History

A Story Of Ancient Power In 'The Rise of Rome'. Interesting that books written for students aren't interesting - however a quick review of Roman history is recommended fro everyone - even if you only have time to skim it from Wikipedia.

The Republic was built on a social system with checks and balances that eventually broke down. The system of government was built around the concept of 'no'. Tributes had the veto and there were two Consuls. The Consul Bibulus 'watching the heavens' during the Consulship of Julius Ceasar is possibly one of the things that encouraged the Civil War that ended the Republic. What the Roman Republic tells us is that in organizations built around the concept of 'no',basically a appeal to power becomes the way of getting things done.

The best thing about Ancient History is that it is familiar and useful (it is about people, economies and social systems) and you can see how things turned out.

School

I hope I don't learn any of these bad habits you learn in school. There has a been a lot of great things I have learned though.

Busyness

Is busyness bad for business

Business is a social activity to achieve results. Is busyness good for for athletics, is it good for combat? I prefer to get things done and I (like most others), like progress.

p.s. Teresa Amabile did a longitudinal study in which she found that people were most motivated by the discernible progress (even small steps).  The article above is based on this study.

I'm glad I watched

Watching the end of the womens' triathlon, with NZ out of the race, I didn't care who won, as long as they deserved it. People like to see achievement (from a sample of one).

Triathalon

I'm listening to the commentary for the triathlon and athe things they need to think about. It's quite complex and there are a lot of decisions to make in the face of uncertainty. Iit's genuinely interesting to hear what others need to weigh up to get the job done.

Something we may have in common...

I'm watching the Olympics, along with I suspect a few billion other people. The womens' triathlon, a sport I know almost nothing about (I remember seeing it when the Olympics were held in Athens as well). Why does someone like me who basically knows nothing about the sport. Is it that we like to watch people compete, partly, I suspect that this is the case but if that were really the case I would much prefer to watch boxing or wrestling (which I don't). I think it is much more basic, I think people like to watch other people to succeed in difficult circumstances. Perhaps this s why we like to support the underdog, greater achievement.

Of course we just may be curious about how things turn out.

Live in the future

Something that helps me a lot - mentally thinking ahead when dealing with an issue.

In my case this comes from a TV series about fighter pilots. The faster the plane, the more you have to think ahead. With a jet fighter you have to think a long way ahead, if you don't fly the plane it will fly you.

If you believe that your skills and capabilities are high performance (like a jet fighter) then think like a fighter pilot and think ahead.

This line of thinking was well supported by the study I did in the Products Development Management course around forecasting - and in particular scenario planning. Scenario planning (thinking of possible outcomes and using these as reference points to identify what other outcomes could exist between these) is something that gets easier with practice. It's the system I use to understand what could be coming next.

Thinking ahead isn't hard - just ask yourself what could this lead to? What is hard is learning the discipline to understand potentially conflicting futures and knowing when one or other becomes the most likely to occur - i.e. when to act.

Bottom line is we are all different, this may not work for you but I find it works for me.

Scorecard or scoreboard

Subtle difference, this article explains the difference quite nicely.

Don't confuse a scorecard with a scoreboard