We’ve come a long way. In the 1960s, David Ogilvy, one of the grand old men of advertising who co-founded of Ogilvy & Mather and was surely a model for the fast-living honchos in the hit TV series, ‘Mad Men’, said his employees must never use the word ‘creative’ to describe what they did. He wanted them to use their imagination, of course, but he didn’t want them to boast about it. They weren’t artists, they were businessmen.

The next generation began to flaunt its creativity and encourage their employees to do the same. When Sim Wong Hoo and his school friend Ng Kai Wa launched a computer repair shop in Singapore, they named it Creative Labs which must have seemed a trifle ambitious even if it was soon challenging established players in digital entertainment products.

In 2010, IBM’s Global Chief Executive survey reported that 1,500 CEOs in over 60 countries believe creativity is the most significant talent in business today.
The IBM report concluded: ‘Creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.’ David Ogilvy would have hated the pompous wording but he might have recognised that times have changed. The message is clear: Creativity is today’s top asset.

From being rather dubious – necessary for artists but dangerous for normal people – creative thinking is now seen as highly desirable for everyone whose job is to use their brains and make decisions in today’s increasingly complex world.

This applies to all companies, large and small, in all industries, and there is a strong case for saying it applies to people in public service such as schools, hospitals, public transport and so on. It even applies to politicians.

The management consultancy McKinsey has mapped this by its research into ‘tacit knowledge’ which is the kind of knowledge that cannot be put into words or pinned down. It’s the kind we use when we make judgements without knowing all the facts. It’s personal and intuitive. It often happens very quickly. In his book, ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell called it ‘thinking without thinking’.

It’s the opposite of those exams when we are given a list of questions with multiple choice answers and have to choose between someone else’s idea of right and wrong. When we use tacit knowledge, we set the test ourselves, both questions and answers. An Indian businessman in Mumbai told me last year that asking the right question is much more important than getting the right answer. If you ask the right question, he said, you contribute at least half the answer. Scenarios planners refer to it as ‘organising question’ which literally organises the way to find the answer.

McKinsey’s research, carried out over several years, showed that about 45% of employees in Europe and the USA say they use tacit knowledge regularly in their work. Even more remarkably, McKinsey found that 75% of new jobs in these countries require people to use tacit knowledge. That is, nearly four out of five companies nowadays expect their new employees to be clever and brave enough to make personal, subjective and unquantifiable judgements as part of their daily routine. It’s what these companies pay people to do. To ask their own questions, find their own answers and then do something about it. The ‘doing’ is part of the process. As Walt Disney said, “The future is not the result of choices among existing paths in the present. It is a place that is created – first, created in the mind; second, created in the activity.’

This has several implications. Companies have to review their recruitment methods, management styles, skills base and training programmes. The conventional person who likes to sit on top of a formal hierarchy and issue blueprints to the workers is not going to happy in an organisation where people prefer to play with their own informal ambiguity and experimentation. Such people may proudly insist their door is always open. But his colleagues may think, why does he need an office at all?

In a creative economy, close to 100% of people assume their job is to make judgements in situations of unknowable complexity, and do so on their own. They are strongly motivated to do so. The routine is not repetition but change and adaptation, which is not really routine at all. They value this freedom as highly as a conventional manager values his financial package. They are, in IBM’s phrase, comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation; both their own and other people’s. It’s not all good news, as constant change creates higher volatility.

Today, there are multiple overlaps between the creative industries and other industries, most obviously in the core sectors of design, fashion, entertainment and digital media but also in electronics, furniture, cars and food. Mainstream industries have adopted wholeheartedly the new business models. Phone manufacturers who might have changed their models every few years now introduce new ones every few months, just as fashion designers who used to have seasons lasting six months now introduce new lines every few weeks. Fashion and phone companies: they share the same work styles, business models and skills, and they both recruit as many creative people as they can.

Creativity is a critical trait for today's top talent.

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