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By Theodore Levitt
HBR OnPoint Spring 2007
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Those who extol virtues of creativity over the vices of conformity«
tend to confuse getting of ideas with their implementation
‡ confusion of creativity in the abstract with practical innovation
‡ not understand the leaders¶ day-to-day problems
‡ underestimate the intricate complexity of organization«

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Two painters«
one tells has a great idea for a painting but does not paint it«
the other has the same idea and paints it
the second painter may be considered a creative artist,
the first, is a talker, not a painter
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‡ Ideas are not enough

‡ A form of irresponsibility
‡ Psychology of the ³creative type´
‡ Advice business
‡ Chronic complainers
‡ Why doors are closed
‡ Making ideas useful
‡ Deciding factors
‡ Need for discipline
‡ Parkinson¶s flaw
‡ From creativity to innovation
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‡ Mythical Answers
‡ Businessmen are not adequately creative
‡ They are enslaved by conformity

‡ Real Answer
‡ Pass off responsibility to others for getting down to brass tacks
‡ Plenty of ideas, little follow-through

‡ Underlying assumption is that creativity automatically leads to

innovation

‡ Ideation and innovation are not synonyms

‡ Ideation is generation of ideas; innovation is idea implementation

‡
‡ Having ideas is seldom equal to getting things done.
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Business is a uniquely get things done institution

‡ Creativity without follow-through is uniquely barren form
of individual responsibility or even irresponsible
because«

‡ Creative man who tosses out ideas without helping them get
implemented is shirking responsibility

‡ By avoiding follow-through he is behaving in an organizationally

intolerable or at best sloppy fashion
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‡ Freewheeling fantasies of very young children «
‡ Naïve curiosity leads to creative freshness«albeit free from
responsibilities«
‡ Scientific sources have parallel the integrative mechanism of adult creativity
with the childhood thought processes

‡ Irresponsibility of creative individuals «Rorschach and stroboscopic tests

‡ Fantasized and projected freely (even too freely in some cases)
‡ Permit themselves to tamper with the form of the inkblot
‡ They were the least ³form-bound,´ least inhibited by facts and their
experiences«minds could explore the new and novel«

‡ Theoreticians do not mind living dangerously, the reason, because the

theoretician is not immediately responsible for action«content to live
dangerously only on conceptual level, where they cannot get hurt«to
accept responsibility for implementation is to risk dangerous actions, and
tat can be painfully uncomfortable
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The most ardent advocates of creativity tend to be professional writers, consultants,

professors and ad agency executives«not surprisingly few of these individuals
have day-to-day responsibility for implementing their new ideas

They seldom have the nerve to«rigorous discipline of not talk but action, not ideas
but work
bes 
 sserers  Amer  sry s a vas qagmre of qver g conformy
Wam H. Wye Te Organaon Man professona rer
Soan Wson Te Man n e Gray Fanne S coege Engs professor en e roe s boo

. Norcoe Parnson Parnson's La professor

Xenerally American business, profits from the existence of these crusaders; but,
harm is done when leaders consider that the role of these crusaders absolves
them from their managerial responsibility

Hard to accept the suggestion that salvation lies so easily in creativity and from
that will automatically flow profit-building innovation«
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³Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and
innovation is not the automatic consequence of ³creative thinking.´

What may pass conformity in business is less about lack of abstract creativity than to a
lack of responsible action«

Those at lower levels of the organization who are actively discontent«are full of
suggestions about what to do about it«constantly complain about
‡ Stand-pat senility of management
‡ Refusal to see the obvious facts of its own massive inertia
‡ Management do not want creative ideas
‡ Ideas rock the boat
‡ Interested in smooth running versus rapidly vaulting forward business
‡ They talk about the company being a festering sore of decaying
conformity, full of decaying vegetables who systemically oppose new ideas
with old ideologies«
‡ Then they quote their patron saint William H Whyte, Jr«.
 






Chief among the reasons is that the leader is busy

handling the day-to-day, ongoing stream of
problems«many of these are problems to which
solutions are more or less urgent and answers to
which are far from clear-cut.

While it is great to have new ideas, these providing those

ideas, that new ideas often create more problems to an
already full plate«
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‡ They must work with the situation as it is«

‡ When they suggest an idea, the responsible procedure

is to indicate some minimal indication of what it involves
in terms of costs, risks, manpower, time, and perhaps
even specific people who ought to carry it out«
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‡ Position or Rank of the Idea Originator in the Organization

‡ At senior levels, talk is virtually action«when ideas flow upward from lower
in the organization, they must be accompanied by the type of follow-
through previously mentioned in the previous slides

‡ Complexity of the Idea

‡ More complex and involved the idea is, the more ground work to assist in
required change and rearrangement within the organization

‡ Nature of the Industry

‡ Supporting details for new ideas depends on the industry involved (i.e.
advertising versus steel)

‡ Attitude and job of the person to Whom the Idea is Submitted

‡ The greater the day-to-day pressure of operating responsibility, the more
resistance to new ideas«

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Advocates of creativity often invoke the essential primacy of the creative

impulse«with talk about being able to ³sell their ideas´«then make
statements about the ³permissive environment´«this is often an attack on
the organization itself«.

One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a

great and constant flow of ideas and creativity«organizations need to
achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a
particular job
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Organizations are created to achieve order. They have policies, procedures,

and formal or powerfully informal (unspoken) rules. The work could not get
done without these rules, procedures and policies. All of this produce the
so-called conformity«
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Those who subscribe to Parkinson¶s Law, lead one-person, self-employed

existence in which there are few make-or-break postmortems of their
activities«A company cannot function as an anarchy, it must be organized, it
must be routinized, it must be planned in some way in the various stage of its
operation
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Conformity and rigidity = too big and unwieldy to survive? m

‡ Creativity would dry up if ³creative´ people would take some responsibility for
follow-through

‡ Big organizations have some attributes that facilitate innovation

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‡ Organizational alternative to the alleged ³conservatizing´ consequences of

bigness
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