Boost Your Creativity in Any Job

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We all know that innovative thinking is vital to individual, team, and organizational success. But we still often put creativity in a box, assuming it's only for people in certain roles or best attempted once a year at an off-site brainstorming session. Marketing executives Kathryn Jacob and Sue Unerman argue that we all need to be exercising our creative muscles more regularly, especially in the age of AI, when routine work can be outsourced to algorithms but new thinking still comes from human minds. They offer prompts for spurring more creativity -- by yourself or with a team -- no matter where you work. Jacob and Unerman are the authors of the book A Year of Creativity: 52 Smart Ideas for Boosting, Creativity, Innovation, and Inspiration at Work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Got 30 minutes? Join Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin for a new monthly edition of the Capital Ideas podcast, brought to you by Capital Group, home of American Funds Distributors, Inc. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
0:18.2	You know, there's another HBR podcast you might like.
0:21.9	Coaching Real Leaders takes you inside real life leadership coaching sessions.
0:26.7	Host Muriel Wilkins has advised CEOs for nearly 20 years.
0:30.9	Listen in as she helps guests work through their hardest career challenges.
0:35.5	Find new episodes of Coaching Real leaders wherever you get your podcasts.
0:59.5	Welcome to the HBRI Deaccast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.
1:11.1	If you ask people in business what drives individual team and organizational success,
1:13.7	creativity often ranks pretty high on the list.
1:17.7	Yes, you need the skills to execute on whatever new ideas you have,
1:22.5	but those great ideas, for ways to streamline processes or find new revenue streams or disrupt your industry, need to come first.
1:25.6	And this is especially true in the age of Gen AI, because while large
1:29.2	language models might be very good at recycling and combining old thinking from the content they've
1:33.6	been trained on, they aren't actually able to think outside that box of existing data. For that
1:39.3	critically important creative work, we still need humans. And yet, according to research studies, only 20 to 25% of people feel they're living up to their full creative potential.
1:49.5	So how do we jumpstart our own creativity? Especially when we're feeling overwhelmed by the pace and demands of our current work.
1:56.2	How do we find the time and energy to pursue novelty and innovation?
2:00.2	Today's guests argue for consistent
2:02.1	small-scale practice. They offer up simple exercises that will allow individuals or teams,
2:07.5	no matter the function or industry, to get better at generating new ideas. Catherine, Jacob,
2:12.5	and Sue Unerman are marketing executives and authors of the book A Year of Creativity,
2:19.6	52 Smart Ideas for Boosting, innovation, and inspiration at work.
	...

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