Chapter Six
142
competitive in the marketplace” (Patterson 2011b: 155). Such creativity
also comes in handy when mixing and matching the best financial options
available to suit particular aspects of a business.
In practice, creativity is tightly related not only to the ability of
forecasting future, but it also results from the highly competitive
environment in which any kind of business functions. Good financial
management, on the other hand, is essential for a business to succeed.
Therefore, financial managers must use their creativity to find a “route to
success” and satisfy their customers better than competition. To be
creative is to continuously develop the business proposition in a way that
keeps customers buying the company’s products or services in preference
to those of its competitors. Innovation, technology and cost reduction are
all activities that can help maintain a sustainable return (Tennent 2008: 4).
At its most basic level, both creativity and imagination are cognitively-
based processes and can be perceived as the ability to form mental images
of real and unreal phenomena or events and to develop different scenarios
or different perspectives on those phenomena or events. Part of being
imaginative is being creatively projective, creating new images or
scenarios with known conceptual analogs (Werhane 1999: 91). As such,
creativity can be also reducible to object manipulation by means of which
highly elaborate, original and complex buildings in the shape of mental
ideas are constructed.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IS RIGOR
The domain of FINANCES is frequently associated with rigor and
precision. As a consequence, it is not surprising that the conceptual
metaphor FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT IS RIGOR is ubiquitous and it
can be conceptualized in a number of ways. Instances of its motivation
surface not only on the linguistic, but also conceptual and practical level.
Thus, the requirement of “being rigorous and objective” leads to the
application of “quantitative and mathematical methods” which are
becoming more and more popular within the various branches grouped
under the umbrella term of financial management. For example, financial
mathematics is the application of mathematical methods in the solution of
problems in finance. Equivalent terms sometimes used are financial
engineering, mathematical finance, and computational finance. Financial
mathematics draws on tools from applied mathematics, computer science,
statistics, and economic theory. Investment banks, commercial banks,
hedge funds, insurance companies, corporate treasuries, and regulatory
agencies apply the methods of financial mathematics to such problems as