January 4, 2012

Is Creativity a Curse to Organizations?

This Day in Business History, 1996…

Excerpts from Nicholas Negroponte, Cofounder and Director, MIT Media Laboratory via Wired magazine January 4, 1996:

“Many of the essentials of a fertile, creative environment are anathema to an orderly, well-run organization.  In fact, the concepts of ‘managing research’ is an oxymoron.  Setting short-term goals, then quickly testing to see if they will bear fruit is similarly absurd. Jerome Wiesner, former president of MIT and science advisor to President Kennedy, was fond of saying, ‘That’s like planting a seedling and, a short while later, yanking it out to see if the roots are healthy.’ ”

“The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways. There will be a lot of misunderstanding – which is frequently not misunderstanding at all, but the root of a new idea.”

“Ideas may come like thunderbolts, but it can take a long time to see them clearly – too long. And ideas are often born unexpectedly – from complexity, contradiction, and, more than anything else, perspective.”

“Alan Kay, father of the personal computer (among other things), likes to say that perspective is worth 50 points of IQ (it may be worth more, Alan). Marvin Minsky, father of artificial intelligence, says that you don’t know something until you know it in more than three ways.  They’re both quite right.”

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