172 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
Simple as it sounds, one key to higher creativity is slowing down.
The consulting group that I mentioned earlier, Interaction Associ-
ates, has a slogan, “Go slow to go fast.” At first I thought it sounded
a little corny, but I have seen it work repeatedly in the past few
years. Perhaps one of the reasons that analyst earnings estimates
are deteriorating, as noted in the last chapter, is precisely this issue
of speed. As they race to cover stocks and grab banking deals, the
quality of their thinking suffers.
Slowing down is a matter of awareness. It’s knowing when you
are in the closed, focused mode and when you are open and recep-
tive. Many of the great discoveries in the history of thought are the
result of this subtle difference. Penicillin, sticky notes, smallpox
vaccine: all were accidents. They resulted from the researcher’s being
open enough to a perceived failure to reframe it. (The classic case
of this is Edison’s response that he had not failed to discover the
appropriate filament for a light bulb; rather, he had successfully
found a thousand filaments that did not work.) This notion that
creativity is often accidental is the premise of a book called Cor-
porate Creativity (Berrett-Koehler 1997) by Alan Robinson and
Sam Stern. The opening story in the book tells how a Japanese
railroad company discovered a new business quite by accident.
While digging tunnels to lay new tracks, the company stumbled on
a reservoir of natural water. It tasted so good that they began
bottling it and eventually marketing it. Within a few years, bottled
water was a multimillion-dollar business for this railroad company.
Why? Because they were in the open mode. They were receptive to
new ideas and possibilities. Robinson and Stern suggest in their
book that this open mode is a powerful tool for creative compa-
nies. You can’t make creativity happen, but you can train your
people to be open to serendipity.
Returning to our discussion of types, the most open types
are “intuitives” and “perceivers.” They tend to live in the open
mode. The most focused types are “sensors” and “judgers.” They
would be the least likely to look at a “failed” experiment and say,14-25 ware 172 1/19/01, 1:15 PM