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Research has shown that you cannot tell someone to be creative in the
way you can tell them to sharpen a pencil. All you can do is create the
right climate. Like gardening, you can but plant the seed and provide
light and water. Then all you can do is give the plant space and wait.
See also
being creative, constraints,
fragility, goals, incubation, managing*, risk,
tension
Quotes
‘No one ever had an idea in a dress suit.’
— Sir Frederick G. Banting
‘Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.’
— Julie Cameron
‘People must know that their ideas will be listened to and, if they have
merit, acted upon. If they do, it is possible to mobilize individual creativity
on a very broad scale.’
— James Champy
‘It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and
searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.’
— Albert Einstein
‘If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find
ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don’t get innovation as a
democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process. Certainly
you get it as an antithetical process, so you have to have an environment where
the body of people are really amenable to change and can deal with the conflicts
that arise out of change an innovation.’
— Max DePree
‘The whole business starts with ideas, and we’re convinced that ideas come
out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with
appropriate friction.’
— Michael Eisner
‘All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are
threatened.’
— Hermann Hesse
‘You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people
become their best.’
— Steve Jobs
‘Men live upon trust.’
— John Locke
‘We need to make the world safe for creativity and intuition, for it is
creativity and intuition that will make the world safe for us.’
— Edgar Mitchell
‘I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with
because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an
open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every
action analysed and every responsibility assigned by an organisation chart.’
— Akio Morita
‘Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity.’
— George S. Patton
‘We’re in the age of the idea. The organization that can develop a culture of
creativity and idea generation will be the winners.’
— Kevin Roberts
‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people
always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become
great.’
— Mark Twain
‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror,
murder, bloodshed. They produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of
democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.’
— Orson Welles
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