Skip to main content

Creativity, Thinking and Productivity

I remember many years ago when I was doing a project for an advertising agency in New York City and we were told not to have any dealings with "those creative types."  This agency was then known as the world's largest and the most successful.  The client was referring to the people who created the adverts that we see on TV, in print ads, and so forth.  These people, at that time, had offices that were literal castles to their own design.  One person's office was only made up of futons.  No desk, nothing else.  Another was painted chartreuse.  Another was filled with various gaming machines that you would find in a gaming  arcade.  In those days, this all seemed very very strange to me, and I couldn't wrap my mind around how this kind of environment could help anyone do their job, let along help this company with their productivity.

Fast forward to today where you see in many companies, whole parts of their facilities set aside for such things as places for the workers not to work, but to play!!  You may find, among other things, these same arcade games, basketball hoops, couches, open areas for lounging, and in some cases, nosh pits where all kinds of food for snacking on or drinking is available.  Other companies offer variations of this, all the way up to the very well known SAS in Cary, N.C., which offers dry-cleaning, concierge services, day-care and so forth to it's employees.  Google is another employer in the same firmament.   

But do these kinds of efforts or something less, effect productivity?? 

I've just finished reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jonah Lehrer, called "Bother Me, I'm Thinking."  I've supplied the link below.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703584804576144192132144506.html?KEYWORDS=Jonah+Lehrer 

Now granted the article is not totally about all of the benefits I mention above, but it is about whether allowing time and perhaps places for creative thinking is a good thing and if there is a casual link to improved productivity.  It is about whether "we force ourselves to focus, to stare straight ahead at the computer screen."  And whether 'we need caffeine to make all of this occur.'  Seemingly research done at the Universities of Michigan and Memphis has now shown that "the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness.  Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in.  They couldn't help but be open-minded.  This is also being related to the attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that young people are being diagnosed with. 

Now obviously not every job needs this kind of creativity, but many do, and some far-sighted companies allow for the proper kind of environment.  Most do not.  Are they hurting their productivity?  It would appear that they are!!

Bob

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

JUST WHAT EXACTLY IS A SUPPLY CHAIN AND HOW DOES A LOUSY VIRUS SCREW THEM UP SO INCREDIBLY WELL!

Recently, I have had quite a few people ask me in the course of small talk, what exactly is this "supply chain" talk they are hearing about again regarding th e Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus.    They've heard the horror stories on     toilet paper or disinfectants in many stores.  Now we've heard of hoarders over-stocking their own homes or selling these products on the street corner at inflated prices.  Many people ask how can this be; what causes this; we are in the 21st century; etc. I remember the start of this current problem back in the 1960s (perhaps earlier) with the start of such programs as MRP (Materials Requirement Planning), but certainly not limited to this program and parlaying further into programs and schemes like J-I-T (Just-In-Time).  Bottom line and perhaps over-simplified, these programs were and are intended to speed up production and cut costs.  There are newer and greater programs like Le...

The Flaw Of Averages

Yes, this post will be primarily a copy of a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article.  The article is the point of this blog. Over my decades in consulting, one of the major requirements in our niche was to insure that our clients received the savings we had forecast that they would achieve in a mutually agreeable manner.  In the very beginning, when I started back in 1974, computers were not easily available or accessible as they had to be huge room-size machines and many clients did not even have them.  So we used adding machines with paper tape to the shortly thereafter personal hand held-calculators.  Personal computers starting with the very first Apple or Radio Shack model proved far superior but had minimal calculating capacity.  None were perfect and because of this limitation, a straight line average over a years period was typically used to compare history to current and prove savings had been achieved. ...

Do You?

 Do you procrastinate?  I know I do it more often than I would like to admit.  We all have a tendency to procrastinate.  Very recently, I saw this photo in a LinkedIn post.   To be legally clear, this is a billboard type advertisement by Nike. They are very famous for their "Just Do It" slogan.   Now they have two and they have combined both into an even more powerful expression. The definition of "procrastinate" from the Oxford dictionary is: "to delay or postpone action; put off doing something."  It is like the old colloquialism "Manana."  MaƱana is tomorrow in Spanish.  We all do it to one degree or another.   From a business perspective, to procrastinate is a terrible situation if you or a great many people in a company or organization do it.  If it occurs too often or too much, then what does it do:  it has the probability to DELAY MOST EVERYTHING.  Is that what you really want?  No, I doubt it.  It very we...