How To Ignite Creative Leadership (IBM - HBR)

As reported by Harvard Business Review (Blog) reviewing IBM's 2010 IBM Global CEO Study :

"Some key points from the study:

1. Even if the recession is over, 79% CEOs expect the business environment to become even more complex in coming years.
2. More than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage this escalating complexity.
3. Western CEOs anticipate economic power to rapidly shift to developing markets, and foresee heavier regulation ahead.
4. A majority of CEOs cite creativity as the most important leadership quality required to cope with growing complexity.

Creativity in this context is about creative leadership — i.e., the ability to shed long-held beliefs and come up with original and at times radical concepts and execution. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. We believe, however, that this isn't about having a lone creative leader at the top but rather about creating a "field" of creative leadership, by igniting the collective creativity of the organization from the bottom up."

...

"By unleashing the creative genius within all its employees, SBI's market share grew from 16.5% to 19% market share in the past four years, while it doubled its stock value and boosted customer satisfaction. The SBI has also won many global awards for its performance.

Based on our 50 year collective experience working with creative leaders worldwide, here are some questions we believe you should address if you wish to develop creative leaders who can help your organization cope with increasing complexity:

1. What cultural, political, organizational and technological barriers should your organization overcome if it has to develop a cadre of creative leaders?
2. What structures, reward systems, processes, metrics and goals do you have in place to support creative leaders?
3. How do you encourage risk taking and learning from failure? How do you measure it?
4. Do you simply adopt best practices learned from industry leaders or do you shape "next practices" that will make your organization the leader in the future?
5. How effective are you in partnering with customers, suppliers, employees and even your competition to improvise "good enough" solutions?"