Strokes of Genius

The notion of creativity has traditionally been more closely associated with artistic endeavors than with corporate leadership. But in a world of accelerating change and disruption in which novel challenges have become the norm, C-suite leaders are increasingly celebrating creativity as a vital talent.

Surveys have found that many CEOs now see creativity as among the most important qualities of a leader. And a McKinsey report prepared for the World Government Summit 2023 in Dubai noted that soft skills such as creativity and critical thinking will only become more important in the years to come. Even so, global consulting giant PwC reports that nearly four in five leaders still struggle to acquire the fundamental creative skills needed to excel in an age of rapid transformation.

Put simply, creativity is fast becoming an increasingly essential talent for unlocking business value. Fortunately, research indicates that creativity can be taught. No matter how “creative” you believe yourself to be, you can build up creative capabilities through routine exercise and practice.

The same principle extends to building up your team’s creative capabilities at work, and there’s a compelling reason to try: the bottom line. A 2017 McKinsey study found that the most creative firms outperformed their peers on a host of financial metrics, demonstrating above-average organic revenue growth, total shareholder return and forward EBITDA.

What does creativity mean in practice? And how can unorthodox thinking help you address challenges and opportunities more readily? We asked Kellogg alumni from a breadth of industries to explain how they apply creative thinking on the job.

Molly Battin ’98 MBA is CMO of Home Depot, the largest home-improvement retailer in the U.S.

Personally, I think creativity needs to be infused in every aspect of a business, even if you don’t have a creative role formally in your job title. At Home Depot, we do a lot of blue-sky thinking events, where we set aside time to ideate on where we could take the business. We have loose agendas. We leave all preconceived notions at the door. And anything is on the table during those sessions.

A great example of how we’re applying creative thinking is our recent partnership with AccuWeather and Spotify to infuse weather data into our targeted marketing. That’s important because the spring season is our Super Bowl at Home Depot — it’s when people start preparing their lawns and getting ready for summer. But spring comes to different parts of North America at different times of the year. We asked ourselves how we could create a media campaign that’s hyper-personalized and gets the right message to the right customer in the right area.

Because of this partnership, if you live in a market where it has been over 65 degrees for five straight days, we can serve you an audio ad mentioning plants that grow well in your area along with a “get out and enjoy spring” message. Whereas if you’re in a market where it’s been cold for the past week, we’re going to send you an indoor-painting ad. And we can be dynamic so that if it’s warm for seven days but then suddenly gets cold, we can change the rotation and send you a more weather-appropriate advertisement.

To unlock innovation, you have to free yourself of strict ways of thinking and be a little courageous. If you’re not a little bit uncomfortable with something you’re doing, then I’m not sure you should even be doing it.

Spark your creative thinking: Ask, "How might we...?"

"I love using this phrase because it opens up ideas in ways that you might not have thought about. As in: How might we solve this problem? How might we address the customer’s pain point? If you come at challenges with an open mind, you’ll get a lot more opportunities on the table."

Elizabeth Liu ’05, ’10 MBAis the CEO of Crowd Cow, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce food startup that connects consumers directly with farms.

Creativity is your fingerprint. It’s your personal intellectual property that creates sustainable differentiation. To me, it’s derived from the perfect cocktail of soft and hard skills. On the soft side, talents like critical listening, customer empathy and design-centric thinking are important, starting with who you’re trying to serve and deeply understanding their needs. But on the hard side, data-driven problem solving is also a key priority now, as is ensuring data integrity so that information is trustworthy and accurate. Learning to fail fast also sets you up as a leader to speed up the cycles of iteration, optimization and, ultimately, innovation.

We experienced this up close during the pandemic. Suddenly the entire country was experiencing grocery shortages, and customers were struggling to maintain access to meat products. At the same time, we had to rethink our supply chain and figure out where we could leverage access to oversupplies in different verticals that no longer had ready-made outlets for their meat.

Thankfully, we had been testing a subscription service prior to the cycle. We started to solve for other challenges beyond variety, like consistency and access to top-quality supplies. That meant rethinking our existing supply chain and fulfillment capabilities — and figuring out how to meet double or triple the previous level of demand. We were able to pivot more readily to where the market was going. We’re now a primarily subscription-based company.

Facing a scenario like that makes you realize that perfection is the enemy of progress. It also forces you to rethink what the core problem you’re addressing for customers is and whether your value proposition is good enough. One of the most powerful activities in creativity is exercising the skills of critical listening and listening outside of your space. That’s very much in the Kellogg DNA.

Spark your creative thinking: Share ideas across the aisle

“I absolutely love pulling in teams that don’t typically collaborate with each other, because so many unexpected ideas can come from that. Maybe it’s marketing and engineering working together to solve a supply chain challenge.”

Erin Amico ’11 MBA is president and CEO of the Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the first Black CEO in the institution’s history.

Thinking about creative solutions helps you not only differentiate from rivals but also adapt more routinely and consistently to your business environment. When COVID happened, 33% of museums nationally risked closure. If we hadn’t been able to pivot and adapt to the new reality by thinking creatively as an institution, we would have followed that trend.

To give you an idea of how creativity can pay off, let me give an example of a recent challenge. We wanted to figure out how to move at the speed of culture to reach Generation Alpha, a generation of digital natives, born with a screen in their hands. How could we create a museum experience that’s important to them? So we created a pop-up immersive exhibit called “My Journey Into the Wilds of Chicago” in partnership with a local nature photographer, paired with a unique soundscape that was designed to be digital-first in nature.

Rather than looking at other museums to see what they were up to, we shifted our frame of reference and said, “We’re not just in the museum category — we’re in the experience category.” And it was very successful. We extended the run, attendance was up and it opened the door to a variety of exciting new things.

Critical to our success was fostering an organizational culture where people aren’t afraid to try and fail. Maybe our project was going to be successful, maybe not. But either way, we were going to learn from the effort. And when you create a culture that’s not afraid to take risks and has that learning mentality, that in itself is a win.

Spark your creative thinking: Follow your ‘compass’

“An exercise we use as a team is called ‘compass,’ in which we divide our team members to stand in the four corners of the room. Each cardinal direction corresponds with a topic starting with the same letter, and that guides the discussion: North is for whatever we need for this to succeed, south is for our suggestions, east is what we are excited about, and west is what we’re worried about.”

Robert Pasin ’97 MBA is the chief wagon officer and third-generation leader of toy company Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic Little Red Wagon.

We have two principles we live by here: “Watch like a hawk” and “Plant a lot of seeds.” The former means we spend a lot of time in people’s backyards and on their driveways and sidewalks, observing families playing together. That’s when we start to see how we can create great products that they love.

For instance, years ago, we were looking at getting into the preschool scooter category for beginner riders between 2 and 4 years old. Every scooter on the market was basically the same design, with one wheel in front and two wheels in back. But when we dug deeper and watched kids riding the scooters, we saw that the back wheels were directly in the way of where the kid’s foot would kick back, which wasn’t very functional.

Our team prototyped different ideas and shifted the two wheels to the front, making it much more stable and easier to ride. At the time, we were selling almost no scooters. Within one year after we launched the product, which we called My First Scooter, we were selling over half a million units.

We’re living out the principle of “planting seeds” through Radio Flyer Studios, an entertainment division we launched recently. For a parent or grandparent, watching these programs could reconnect them with their childhood. For a child, they’re just fun, adorable shows they love with characters they adore. But who knows? We might get it wrong. Again, it’s a seed that we’re planting, and we think it could take the brand to a new level and increase the love that people have for Radio Flyer.

Spark your creative thinking: Make it real, then test it

“We prototype and build a lot of things. If we have a promising idea, the team will craft a design out of real materials, and we’ll get kids to use the product so we can observe them in motion.”

Andrew Watts ’05 MBA is the senior vice president of product management at Zalando SE, a Berlin-based online platform for fashion and lifestyle products.

Storytelling is an important part of your creative journey. It’s not only about getting customers to understand new approaches and ways of thinking; it’s about getting internal teams excited about these efforts too.

One of the most important things you need to figure out is what impact you’re looking to create. What are the key performance indicators you’re going to use? Think in terms of a threeto five-year time horizon and imagine what the world will look like then. Then ask yourself: What is the next step forward to get there from where we are right now — and what’s the next step after that?

For instance, last year, we were thinking about our three-year customer experience vision for Zalando. We started by thinking about the moments when customers choose to spend time in their day with us. Understanding how busy people’s lives are, we realized we needed to create something interesting that would draw people in. When we started to think about e-commerce and online shopping, we realized most people use keyword-driven searches — but that’s not how they interact in any other part of their life. So we built an AI-powered Zalando Assistant. We built an initial prototype virtual assistant in less than 48 hours for people to converse with, and our beta version launched publicly four months later. It has been amazing to see the richness of the interactions, which are much more like a conversation.

Not only were we able to move fast as a result of this approach, but we also identified a core problem for our customers — and the solution has been quite successful, with more than 500,000 customers using it so far as of March 2024.

Spark your creative thinking: Start broad, start slow

“If you jump to specific solutions or ideas right away, you put immediate constraints on yourself. I like to hold back and keep people thinking broadly.”

Using creativity to double down on strengths

John Rim ’85 MBA is the president and CEO of Samsung Biologics, based in Seoul, South Korea.

When pursuing innovation, you need to think holistically about all dimensions of the business and its various stakeholders. Creativity can come into play not only in how you manage the business itself but also in how you interact with customers, peers, government agencies and shareholders. That means that in addition to thinking about short-term budgets, you also have to explore where in the mid- and long-term range you can generate greater shareholder and enterprise value.

But innovation is not a simple equation, because everything in business is now changing on an ongoing basis. Your priorities are constantly changing too. You have to regularly think through and prioritize where you need to be creative now and what you can put off to a later date. Determining where and how to exercise your creativity is also a process of prioritization. One of our competitive advantages at Samsung Biologics is the speed at which we execute and launch new products. Given how important it is to have strategic agility and make quick decisions today, we’ve tried to build competitive advantage by amplifying that.

Creatively, we look for areas that we’re good at and then figure out how to further accentuate those strengths. The more you empower great people to collaborate and execute well, the greater your employee engagement will be, which ultimately leads to better financial performance and results.

At the end of the day, success still comes down to empowering and motivating good people. Giving them adequate bandwidth, support, development and room to run with new ideas is critical for success at any company.

Spark your creative thinking: Think methodically

Rethinking the supply chain

Karen Liu ’12 is the vice president of business development for IKEA China and is based in Shanghai.

Circumstances are always changing — but what’s different from before is the speed at which change now occurs. If we don’t exercise creativity on a daily basis, we’ll miss opportunities to grow and stay relevant.

At IKEA, we look at challenges through the lens of a design-thinking approach, exploring where we can use digital innovations to solve problems in a better and more efficient way. Many people have a natural resistance to thinking differently, but we find it critical to start with a more open mindset. We’re constantly asking ourselves: “What’s the real problem we’re solving for here?” and “How does our solution add value for customers?”

For example: Here in Shanghai, when COVID hit, a significant lockdown happened overnight — and no one was prepared for it. We had to reimagine our supply chains and the way we did business to get products to those who needed them. Before the pandemic, we managed our inventory through a global planning system. But during the lockdown, that system wasn’t fast enough to meet ongoing needs. So small teams of co-workers from different departments worked together to create an ad hoc product fulfillment and distribution network to get inventory from wherever we could and deliver it on demand.

We had to operate according to our North Star values of working together and serving our community. By working together to be faster and more agile, we were able to come up with new ways of getting products to our customers, even in challenging times.

Spark your creative thinking: Make it simple

“We’re constantly asking, what’s the simplest way that we can get a job done? The more efficient we can be, the better.”

Blending art forms for better storytelling

Mark Mitten ’83 MBAis the founder of Mitten Media and an Emmy-winning film producer.

One way of looking at creativity is that it’s being contrarian. If everybody is looking left and I look right, I could find an opportunity that’s been missed or hasn’t been capitalized on.

We produce films, primarily documentaries, and we often face the challenge of how to present our subjects and their stories in a way that’s compelling to viewers. For example, I’m working on a project that started as a short documentary using both interviews and animation. It worked very well, and the team and I decided it could become a feature-length documentary.

Our protagonist is Japanese, and I had been learning that a lot of Japanese culture harks back to the legend and the spirit of the samurai. I also learned more about anime and man-ga — animated TV shows, movies and books that are extraordinarily popular in Japan.

When you start to look deeper, you find that the two main genres that always seem to deliver box office grosses these days are horror and anime. So I went back to my team and said, “I think we need to start to explore anime.” That was a lightbulb moment. We realized that approach could work because it drew upon a modern-day samurai story but still paid homage to the history, and it opened up our film to a broader audience be-cause no documentary has ever used anime as a platform before.

We’re in the business of storytelling, after all. We want to produce something that’s going to have emotional resonance and a connection to the audience. It’s important to inspire creativity within your internal stakeholders and staff too — it can build positive camaraderie, elicit energy, and make people feel like they have real influence and owner-ship over the work.

Spark your creative thinking: Break the ice

“When I bring a team together to brainstorm, the first thing I do is ask an icebreaker question that puts us all on equal ground. My go-to is: ‘What was your first concert?’ It’s personal but not too personal, and it opens us up. I also like to pair people with different backgrounds because when it comes to creativity, diversity in thinking is hugely important.”