Blog #4: Creativity

My last job prior to graduate school was working as an internal auditor for Freescale Semiconductor. I was rotated to this role after working in another division as a financial analyst for two years. One thing Freescale did to foster creativity and breadth of experience among its employees is rotate them about every 16 to 24 months. Coming into the audit department was an ideal next rotation for me because I had built up my knowledge of the business as an analyst, but I wasn’t really an expert at anything yet. That proved helpful during my time as an auditor because I was constantly an outsider, poking my nose in areas and processes of the company that I had never seen before. The WSJ article talks about creativity and breakthroughs depending on the naivety of non-experts. The great thing about being an internal auditor versus external is that one of my main objectives when doing audits was to improve efficiency. One of the first things I did when examining a control was to create or update a process flow chart. Lots of times I would find variances between the process flow and what was actually occurring. Often I could find steps that were useless in mitigating a risk because it was my job to ask why we do each step of a control process. Sometimes it takes an outsider to prompt someone to take a step back and question why they’re doing something.

In comparing my two roles as a financial analyst and an auditor at Freescale, I felt free to think creatively much more in my auditor role. As a financial analyst for a particular part of the business, my duties were much more cyclical and predictable. Looking back, I can see many areas (reporting, budget planning) where I got stuck in a rut of doing things in a certain way because I started to develop blinders. There’s also a tendency to do things the way they’ve always been done if the company culture encourages that. Alternatively, questioning processes was part of my job description as an auditor, so I felt uninhibited to do that without consequences.

Staying too long in a particular role does hurt creativity unless you’re given opportunities to explore different parts of the company. One thing Freescale did to improve efficiency in its manufacturing processes was to hold Kaizen events, where employees of different disciplines came together for about a week with the goal of solving a persistent problem. Kaizen is Japanese for “improvement” or “change for the better.” These Kaizen events were often successful not only because of the different disciplines coming together to look at a problem, but also because everyone came in with the attitude and expectation that changes would result. In this way, I think a company can encourage creativity in problem solving as group if the environment is set up to do so.

In terms of fostering creativity in myself, I have a hard time doing so without a lot of outside inspiration. I’ve always thought of myself as a very left-brained person, preferring rigidity to looseness. During my time in business school, I’ve come to realize that I have done a great disservice to myself for thinking that way. Even as I write this blog post, I’m reminded of how much I self-edit before putting anything on paper versus letting my thoughts fly and editing later. My undergraduate education was in the business school as well, and I have always regretted not doing a dual-degree in a liberal arts discipline such as government or philosophy where I would have been challenged in different ways. I see my MBA classmates who come from non-traditional business backgrounds such as teaching approach problems differently, and it has encouraged me take a more diverse set of classes. One of my favorite things about the MBA program is how flexibly you can design your education. For example, I’m taking a class on sustainability this semester not because I think that’s an area I will actually pursue as a career, but rather because it’s a topic that interests me.

The WSJ article talks about the “feelings of knowing” which are the intuitions we have when we think we may be close to finding the answer to something. I agree that these intuitions are likely to develop over time by following some simple advice asserted in the article: increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed. If we’re truly doing that, we should be able to trust those intuitions more. This also supports the notion that it’s important for people to pursue hobbies and interests outside of their core profession and expertise.

The article also describes some studies experimenting with different ways people can foster their creativity including having a few drinks and being groggy. I’ve often heard my classmates joke about tossing back a few drinks so they can go home and churn out a paper easier, so maybe we are on to something there after all. I also think I’ve spent a good portion of my MBA career sleep-deprived, so at least this article reassures me that maybe some of that time wasn’t spent in vain. The author suggests ten ways to improve creativity, and the one that resonates with me the most is “See the World” to develop open-mindedness. The MBA program fosters this by having a “global view of business” requirement in the curriculum which can be satisfied through certain global-focused classes or global connections trips. I’ve been fortunate enough to live abroad in Italy during undergraduate and to participate in a global connection trip to South America during my time in the MBA program. These experiences were a privilege I wish more people could experience because they really have shaped the way I understand different cultures.