Your Creative Mind: How to Disrupt Your Thinking, Abandon Your Comfort Zone, and Develop Bold New Strategies

One

Time to Let Go of New Habits

IN 1971, TWO BROTHERS opened an 800-square-foot used bookstore in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Throughout the next two decades, this family-run enterprise would grow into Borders Books, the giant chain with more than 650 stores and thousands of employees. Borders created an amazing in-store experience, bringing the joy of browsing through thousands of titles to areas of the country that had never had bookstores before. Two years after its IPO in 1995, Borders stock hit an all-time high. Yet just 16 years later, the company that one publisher had called the envy of the industry filed for bankruptcy. What happened?

There are many reasons that businesses close their doors. We’ve all heard the dismal statistics about how often new businesses fail. The precise numbers are hotly disputed, typically ranging from a grim nine out of 10 to a more optimistic five out of 10 enterprises shutting down within the first year to 18 months. Writing in Forbes, Eric T. Wagner offered five reasons for such failures: lack of connection with customers, lack of a unique value proposition, lack of effective marketing, lack of effective leadership, and lack of a profitable business model.¹ And certainly if your organization is lacking any of these vital components, it will not be around for long.

But what about the companies that have all these ingredients and do rise to great success—as Borders did—and then suddenly and unexpectedly disappear? These fail for multiple reasons, including poor financial leadership and bad marketing decisions. Sometimes a dramatic shift in consumer behavior proves too much for a company to overcome. The A&P grocery store chain—founded in 1859 and so dominant in the 1940s that some considered it a monopoly—recently filed for bankruptcy. In truth, the company never recovered from the population shift of families from urban centers to the burgeoning suburbs during the 1970s. Grocery shoppers were no longer walking to neighborhood stores in central cities; instead they were driving to larger grocery stores with huge parking lots and lower prices. A&P lost millions of dollars as a result.

Often, however, it is a new technology or a new way of thinking about an existing product that interferes with the business model of a strong, well-run company. Disruptive technologies are really nothing new, although the term has only recently become popular. Wagon-wheel makers lost their livelihood to automobiles, and cowboys were no longer needed to herd cattle over hundreds of miles once railroads could carry refrigerated cars full of beef.

In Borders’ case, the disruptive technology was two-fold: deeply discounted online books sales and e-books. The company was clearly aware of these threats, but their strategic responses proved either poorly calculated or extraordinarily unlucky. Faced with two such fundamental challenges to its business model—which relied on in-store purchases of paper books—Borders continued to expand its number of retail stores. This was a very risky move, involving immense expenditures in real estate, construction, and ongoing overhead.

Borders’ decision seems foolhardy in hindsight, but its leaders correctly understood that part of its appeal was the in-store experience. They hoped that by opening new locations that experience would continue to translate into profits. Borders succeeded in reaching new markets, but its customers began browsing books in the store and then buying them later online; in the meantime the company accrued hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate debt.

Building more stores was not Borders’ only misstep. It started carrying large inventories of CDs and DVDs just before digital music and media cut deeply into the profitability of both. It hired Amazon to handle its online marketing and e-books, and of course Amazon later rose to become one of the online competitors that put Borders out of business.

It is easy to forget that Borders was a disruptive innovator at its inception. It was a big box store, undercutting prices and putting many small independent bookstores out of business. One of its founders developed a software program that revolutionized the way bookstores managed inventory and projected sales. Yet like too many large, successful companies, its leaders were not able to react quickly enough to the rapid changes in the market. Barnes and Noble, by contrast, survives with its own extensive online offerings and the Nook, its own e-book reader.

Accelerating Change

Borders was a well-run company that offered products and an experience that all of its customers loved. For two decades it had a competitive advantage in its inventory software, but when the digital revolution hit, it simply couldn’t make the necessary adjustments quickly enough.

Kodak—a company that was extremely profitable for more than a hundred years—encountered the same problem with digital photography. If Kodak had been in the business of selling cameras, it could have made the transition smoothly. It easily could have sold digital cameras since a Kodak engineer had invented the first one. But Kodak’s business model relied on selling cameras at razor-thin margins, making the bulk of its profit on film. Despite being aware of the approaching digital revolution for decades, it did not adjust its business model quickly enough to survive. Fujifilm’s leaders, on the other hand, understood the changes on the horizon, made drastic cuts, and acquired multiple digital startups, which helped them weather the storm successfully.

As with Borders, it is easy to criticize Kodak’s leaders in hindsight. Yet it is not hard to see how a company that had been so successful for so long could have difficulty grasping the impending death of their business model. What truly innovative leaders must understand is that death, without fail, comes for us all.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personification of death. Unlike the dreaded Hades—terrifying god of the underworld—Thanatos was not traditionally feared. He was believed to carry people off gently when the fates had decreed that their time had come. No business idea, no technology, no innovation, no product, or service has eternal life. Part of unleashing our true creative potential is understanding that everything we create will endure for a finite amount of time, and then Thanatos—in the form of an e-book, a digital camera, or whatever new idea is currently changing the world—will come to carry it off. This is not an event to be feared; it is to be expected and prepared for.

Expecting change does not necessarily make it feel less disruptive. At the turn of the 20th century, parents worried when mail began to be delivered to computers instead of to the post office. For the first time, young ladies could get letters from young men without their parents’ knowledge. Today, parents can barely keep up with the video- and photo-sharing technologies that allow their children to stay in touch with friends 24 hours a day.

Furthermore, technological change is accelerating. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. The vinyl record appeared in 1948, the cassette tape in 1963, the compact disc in 1982. When the first iPod appeared in 2001, people no longer had to purchase physical objects in order to buy music. Instead, they paid to download it off the web, and profit margins soared. Just seven years later, Spotify launched its digital streaming service. This allowed customers to pay a set fee (or no fee at all if they didn’t mind a few ads) to listen to unlimited selections, disrupting the business model of paying for individual downloads.

Staying Flexible

As we age, our joints and muscles tend to become stiff. If we do not take the time to exercise and stretch, we will lose flexibility and may eventually lose our mobility altogether. The same process can occur with our minds. After performing tasks a certain way for so many years, the idea of changing or adapting seems infinitely more daunting than it did when we were in our teens.

Cognitive rigidity—the inability to consider different viewpoints or innovative solutions to a problem—afflicts all of us at times to varying degrees. At its mildest, it is merely the inability to change one’s opinion about a subject, even when presented with significant evidence to the contrary. At its most extreme, it can involve a nearly sociopathic lack of empathy for others. Ironically the more expertise we develop in a particular field, the more difficult it can be for us to look at things in new or different ways. Some have described this phenomenon as the tyranny of experience. We become captive to what we know, sometimes at the expense of learning something new.

Cognitive rigidity is a common symptom in children with Asperger’s syndrome and high-functioning autism, causing them to have tremendous difficulty coping with changes in the rules or routine they are expected to follow, as well as with making transitions from one environment to the next. Many neurologists believe this is because the part of the brain that controls executive function—impulse control, mental flexibility, and planning—are not working properly. In a much less extreme way, adults can experience similar problems if they do not stretch or challenge their brains to remain sufficiently flexible. Entire organizations become accustomed to a certain set of rules governing the market and to a certain business model. They become deeply uncomfortable with any idea or proposal that deviates from that set of assumptions.

It seems likely that this kind of rigid thinking was part of Kodak’s problem. As Avi Dan wrote in Forbes, Immensely successful companies can become myopic . . . Kodak’s story of failing has its roots in its success, which made it resistant to change. Its insular corporate culture believed that its strength was in its brand and marketing, and it underestimated the threat of digital.²

Corporations are not the only ones that suffer from this problem. During World War II, the Americans broke the Japanese diplomatic code in 1940, yet Japanese advisers continually assured their leaders that such a feat was not humanly possible. This allowed the Americans to know precisely where every Japanese supply ship was stationed and attack them with submarines. In 1943, they were able to kill one of their most effective leaders, Admiral Yamamoto, when his flying schedule was put on the air.

Tension and Balance in the Creative Process

So how do we avoid rigid thinking? Obviously we cannot reject all routine and refuse to develop specialized expertise. In fact, human beings need habits and routines to survive. All kinds of necessary activities—brushing our teeth, tying our shoes, or working out for an hour at the gym—need to be performed over and over. And the more often we repeat an action or a set of actions, the less mental energy we have to exert to perform them. New York Times business writer Charles Duhigg explained in his book The Power of Habit that habits are a three-part process: the trigger, the behavior itself, and the reward. Whether the habit is good, bad, or neutral is immaterial. The smell of a donut can catch our attention (trigger), we purchase and eat the donut (behavior), and experience delicious taste and a sugar high (reward). Once this process is repeated often enough, the brain automates it, and we no longer have to think about what we’re doing.

Habits are vital to conserve our mental energy for more important tasks. Habitual behaviors allow us to do two things at once, such as drive to work while carrying on a conversation, or listen to music while exercising or cooking dinner. Organizations also need routines. A salesperson who comes up with a different way to ask for certain pieces of information each time he or she speaks to a prospect will waste valuable time and energy (and lose valuable information) when compared to the person who works from a script that is market tested and requests all the needed data. If accountants have to rediscover every month how to process invoices, it will take much longer than if they have a set system to deal with them.

But habits have a dark side too. It is possible to become so automated that we lose the ability to function outside our daily routines, leading to dangerous levels of rigidity in the way we think. Sometimes—as ironic as it seems—the creative process can become routine: an exercise in going through the motions rather than creating something new.

Throughout history, various cultures have coped differently with the inherent tension between the need for routine and the desire of spontaneity and flexibility. In his book The Teachings of Don Juan: The Yaqui Way of Knowledge, anthropologist Carlos Castaneda explores Yaqui Indian shamanism in central Mexico. The Yaqui think of themselves as warriors in a dangerous world, and as a result resist developing routines and patterns in their lives that they believe will make them vulnerable. For example, they point out the danger of walking on the same road every day, noting that such a practice makes one susceptible to assault.³ Although numerous scholars have disputed the academic validity of his findings, Castaneda’s descriptions paint a compelling picture of how easy it is to get into a rut in our daily routines, and how difficult it can be to break out.

The Problem with Brainstorming

For decades most of the West has approached the creative process with variations on the brainstorming model, made popular in the 1950s. Yet for years I have coached my clients to apply entirely different techniques. Once I helped a company to re-brand a soft drink that had been losing market share for years. I set before a group of several of their leaders a plethora of items: an umbrella, a rubber tube, a coffee grinder, a toaster, and a vase, and then I asked them to choose one. After considering their choices, they selected the coffee grinder. We proceeded to identify and then apply specific characteristics of the coffee grinder to the soft drink branding issue as a creativity exercise. (I share more on this creativity technique in Chapter 7.) By the end of the session, they had come up with an entirely fresh message about the beverage, which launched a successful marketing campaign and revitalized sales for the first time in years.

Why did this approach work? For decades, scientists assumed that the adult brain was like a vault of information. You could make deposits and withdrawals, but you couldn’t really change its structure or design. We knew our brains could be injured by trauma, of course, but we really didn’t think they could be improved much, other than by cramming them full of more data.

This understanding of the brain shaped the way we understood the creative process. Brainstorming seemed to harness perfectly the potential of a group of people. Get all those information vaults together in a boardroom and have everyone dump their contents onto the table. Then everyone would be able to examine the information supplied by everyone else in the room, and the best ideas would rise to the top.

Most of us are familiar with the ground rules of a classic brainstorming session. There is no such thing as a stupid idea: no judgment or criticism is permitted. Furthermore, the wackier the idea the better; everyone is encouraged to think outside the box. All participants are expected to contribute as many ideas as they can, and whenever possible, ideas should be combined or build off of one another. These, we were told, were the key ingredients to release originality and innovation.

In one sense, it is easy to understand why brainstorming became popular with corporate executives: you get to hear from everyone, and everyone feels heard. But more often than we care to admit, brainstorming proves far better at producing quantity than quality. If we are honest, brainstorming sessions frequently yield a mass of mediocre ideas rather than a few brilliant ones.

There are several reasons for this: First, the group environment of brainstorming sessions naturally biases the entire operation toward the more extroverted members. Yet the world is full of brilliant problem-solvers who are not naturally comfortable sharing their ideas in a group setting; you will rarely hear from them