My Views on Creativity

Creativity. Wikipedia says “Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created.” Dictionary.com says “Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like and to create meaningful ideas, forms, methods, interpretations etc.; originality, progressiveness or imagination.” And if I search really extensively, I can probably get numerous other versions of how creativity is defined. This is because creativity is not an exact science. It is one of those things that cannot be limited to the confines of a definition but can mean so much and so many different things for different people. An inventor’s idea, a comedian’s joke, a writer’s story, an artist’s painting, and a musician’s music – all portray creativity. But these are some of the traditional examples, things that can be either readily seen or heard or read. A new approach to an old problem, being able to extract new information from simple data, handling a situation when you kill two birds with one stone – these are some of the less conspicuous but equally relevant portrayals of creativity.

 People are inherently creative, to varying degrees of course, but nonetheless creative. Even a three year old child knows how to manipulate his parents to woo them into playing his favorite cartoon on television. Some can physically create something and for some, it’s a part of their thought process. I see myself belong to the second category. The most recent example that comes to mind is ‘cracking the cases’ while preparing for consulting interviews. It requires a certain combination of creative and logical thinking to be able to come up with a solution in a limited amount of time; and which like music, art or writing gets better with practice. And not surprisingly enough, there are bouts of extreme creativity at one time to absolute blankness at others. External factors play a huge role in shaping the thought process and that’s why a music piece created when happy sounds ‘happier’ than a music piece created when upset. I would like a share one of the most creative piece of art done my dear friend Archana. A painting which portrays one of the Hindu goddess name ‘Kali’. I believe creativity is inborn when it comes to art.

Individual creativity may or may not translate into organizational creativity. Though at an organizational level, it can be a part of the work culture, the presence of which may result in huge successes and the lack of which in ultimate failure. Given the excessive competition in any and every industry, innovation leads to competitive advantage and we all know what that can do for the organization. When I worked at Dell this summer, I could truly see why this company succeeded in the first place – through its innovative supply chain management processes. I can write another entire blog on this one. Going forward, when a new direction is required for the company to change its practice and remain competitive, they are not afraid to go private. When it is practiced at work, it is engraved in the daily routine and becomes a part of being.

Even when working as a team, in a group, creativity starts with an individual. With someone who asks a simple question, someone trying to find a solution for a problem, someone who doesn’t want to stick to status quo and wants to do things faster, smarter and profitably. It may need reinforcements in terms of complements but still, it takes one creative individual to start the bandwagon rolling. Innovations begets innovation and there, we have a creative group in an organization. Let’s take a very simple example. A team of engineers designing the latest chip for Intel microprocessor. This is definitely a result of most creative minds at work and the goals are achieved by leveraging every individual’s skillset to achieve a common objective for the organization.  

I would like to now elaborate on a situation where I used my creative hat at work – After graduating from my undergraduate degree; I started my career as a business consultant with a large Enterprise Resource Process implementer. All new recruits had to go through an intense three week training program. It was really hard for me, to sit in the same room day after day listening to senior consultants explain the system. Surprisingly the senior consultants were not happy either. They had no time to train us during their normal working hours, which meant the tasks related to their projects were being affects, which translated to very unhappy clients. I saw a bottle neck here, and I suggested an idea - digitalize the entire training process - to the top management. They were happy with the idea and asked me to implement it.

The process I followed were

-          I divided and allocated the different training materials amongst the senior consultants.

-          Each of them was asked to record the process, for example – record the process of creating a customer order using free software called i-demo. Once the recordings were completed, they were able to edit them and also add comments if required.

-          I then converted these recordings into flash video files and stored them in a database which all the employees had access to.

-          New recruits are now trained for 2 weeks, of which one week involved senior consultants lecturing and the other week was a self-studying process using these recordings.

-          Not only did this idea reduce the training time, but it had other benefits too. If a consultant from finance wanted to learn about a process in distribution, he/she could access these recordings to help. Even the clients started using these videos to help them learn about modules.

Unfortunately, most of my innovative thinking happens only when it is not required by a competitionJ. For example, if someone said come up with a brilliant idea during a competition, it just does not happen with me.

Sadly with the current education system, numbers are given a heavy weightage. But in the real world, is that what matters? I personally believe the education system needs a change. Instead of having classes based on notes, students should be allowed to practice and innovate in the real world. During engineering, I was taught so many theories of transistors, but instead if I was taught to build circuits using transistors I would have been much more skilled.

Is creativity important for everyone to have? For sure, without creativity, there would be no mac, televisions, and laptops. Not surprisingly, this could be a reason why most successful entrepreneurs ended up being college drop outs.  So why not educate students to be creative and change the entire system? 

Using Design Thinking To Develop A New Fitness Concept!

The meaning of the word fitness to majority of women from Tamil Nadu, India and Sri Lanka astonishes me. I have been fortunate to interact with women from various age groups and an interesting thing I inferred from most of them was their definition of fitness – merely losing weight for an important occasion! It may come across as odd and funny to many reading this, but is extremely interesting for me to think of ways to change the perception of fitness that women seem to have back at home.

As a kid, I did not know what it meant to eat healthy and make physical exercise a part of my daily routine. Interestingly enough, initially even I became fitness fanatic only because I wanted to lose weight. Being a food-lover, I feasted on all the delicious food available when I went to India to study engineering. After six months of being there one day it became plainly clear to me that I had become much heavier than I was. This made me desperate to lose weight. I shed all the extra pounds, but thankfully, did not stop there. I started reading fitness magazines and learning about different ways to get a good workout. This thought process became an obsession, and therefore an indispensable part of my life.

But what surprised me is why women in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka merely see working out as losing weight for an event such as their wedding. They work out and diet extremely hard, till the biggest day of their lives – ‘The wedding day’ and get back to the business of eating and becoming fat almost immediately after. I have always wondered, should working out not be a part of the routine? Should it not be something you enjoy doing every day, or almost every day, rather than for the sake of achieving a trivial goal and then forget all about it?

Since this topic has always intrigued me, I decided that in the near future I would come up with an entrepreneurial venture in India, where women could come to work out because they enjoy exercising and being fit, not because they are merely supposed to or have to. It is funny how my friends decide to exercise only if they have nothing else to do. I can’t help but think, shouldn't it be a part of lifestyle instead. I realized the perception was not because of the place they lived in, but because of the concepts and wrong notions embedded in their minds as kids. For example: I am currently training for a half marathon. There are days when I have had so much work to do, yet I decide to go for a run. It surprises me how my friends end up saying statements such as – ‘Should you not prioritize your time? Is losing weight important or preparing for an interview? Why do you have to run? Why are you wasting time? Well, little do they realize, my running has nothing to do with losing weight. Moreover, working out is probably as important to me as my sleep. I need it to let my body function well, stay fit and honestly – enjoy my ‘me’ time with no distractions.

I would like to apply the different concepts and approaches we learnt in class to find answers to my question. Firstly – in this scenario my persona would be women between 22 and 60.  The most important thing for me would be to try and understand what fitness means to them. To me it is part of my everyday life which keeps me physically healthy and mentally focused. It is not a short term goal, rather a lifestyle choice. One possible reason I found out through my research was – lack of education on the significance of exercise. Next, I would learn about current means women have available to work out, and try to understand why these are not good enough. For example, having the same exercise routine for a 50 and 25 year old makes absolutely no sense to me.

‘Professionals should consider developing fitness programs for people of retirement age. As club chain has knowledge and use latest technology, help should be taken to educate new users on new trends.’’ – International Indexed Referred Research Journal

So the goal of my paper is to find out the root cause of majority of women in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka thinking that working out is to lose weight for an occasion. Secondly I would like to research on existing methods of exercising and come up with an innovative way of exercising back at home and hopefully change their perception about exercising and physical fitness. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to implement this idea and make more women interested in the fascinating world of fitness.