Creative Talent

To tap creative talent is one of the toughest challenges for Managers, who, for one, are themselves expected to be creative. The present systems are incapable of identifying creative people for jobs that need them. Consequently, even the present Managers are poor in the right creativity, since they too have been recruited from the same system. This calls for a huge flush & cleanse exercise in our organizations. (I believe it's needed for most systems in this world anyway).

Creative people

• May not have good communication skills. Very few do. It's natural, and true for all skills which are not our core competences.
• May not want to compete, even for what they are good at.
• May not be aggressive and assertive.
• May not have the so-called Leadership skills.
• May not have the same creative potential in every damn thing.
• May not get motivated with what the management sciences prove are best for satisfaction and productivity.
• May not think long term. May not want rewards. May not think profits. May not listen.
• May not have any desire to succeed or to rise in the organization.
• May not want greater responsibility.
• May have no interest in leading a team. May even hate people and team work.

 

...and so on... The point is, that it's foolish to expect people with creative potential to think and feel like others. And so the management principles, which appeal (questionably though) to normal minds, would definitely not work in case of most creative people. Coz on the one hand they are different, and on the other, they are different from each other, and with significant differences!

Creativity often seems to be one of the most misunderstood concepts. We often tend to associate it with artists without any strong basis. Perhaps, we tend to assume that all artists are like painters, the ones who imagine, interpret and depict stuff in new and beautiful ways. Someone who is adept at making your portrait if you sit in front may just be skillful, but not creative. Another example is photography. Nothing artistic and creative about it if it's just about clicking pictures, some of which turn out to have elements of creative difference by chance. A singer may not be creative. A composer is. One must judge creative potential of people from what they do, not from what they are.

One of the favorite questions asked in MICA Entrance interviews is 'What's the craziest thing you have ever done?' Another wrong notion - that creative people do crazy things, or rather things which ordinary mortals consider crazy. While this is really not true, such assumptions (many others besides this) kill the prospects of many deserving people entering MICA. The problem here, as I feel, is that of what we are conditioned to expect from people of a certain kind. For example, we would like to see creative people do crazy things. And we end up promoting crazy people, rather than creative people. Imagine, how big a disaster that is.

An analogy here is the way children are looked at by grown-ups. They are expected to be funny, cute and crazy - all that within bounds - besides being smart, intelligent and innocent, rather than what they actually are. Rather than giving importance to the fact that kids are real individuals with real personalities, thoughts, emotions and capabilities, parents burden them with expectations based on pleasant stereotypes.

Have any creative solutions to the creativity problem?