The ultimate creativity machine. How BMW turns art into profit

Many companies face the challenge of balancing art with commerce. The conflict between corporate pragmatism and artistic passion and quality is persistent: designers chafe under corporate requirements, budgets, and deadlines, and nondesigners struggle to understand the business value of artistic choices. At German carmaker BMW, the fanaticism about design excellence is matched only by the company's driving desire to remain profitable. Global design director Chris Bangle presides over the intersection of art and commerce at BMW, managing the often-strained relationships among the designers, engineers, and business managers. Bangle goes to great lengths to protect his designers from the unproductive commentary of others in the company, literally posting "Stop: No Entry" signs on the design studio doors. He also protects the design process, making sure that time-to-market pressures do not harm the designs by shifting the focus to engineering too soon. As a mediator, Bangle appeals to the core values of the company and a deeply held sense about BMW-ness--a pride of product shared by everyone in the company that expresses itself in the classic quality of the cars. Every employee, designer and nondesigner alike, understands that if a car doesn't meet this standard of excellence, it's simply not a BMW--and customers won't buy it. Managing at the intersection of art and commerce means translating the language of art into the language of the corporation. In this First Person account, the author describes his inventive techniques for getting the best from his artists--and getting his ideas across to corporate managers.     

Why bad projects are so hard to kill

Even at the prototype stage, experts were saying the technology was obsolete. Yet, in the face of tepid consumer response, the company stubbornly kept increasing production capacity and developing new models. By the time it was finally killed, the initiative had cost the company an astounding $580 million and had tied up resources for 14 years. The product was RCA's SelectaVision videodisc recorder, and its story is hardly unique. Companies make similar mistakes--if on a somewhat smaller scale--all the time. But why? No one comes to work saying, "I'm going to pursue a project that will waste my company millions of dollars." Quite the opposite. They come to work full of excitement about a project they believe in. And that, surprisingly, can be the root of all the trouble--a fervent belief in the inevitability of a project's ultimate success. Starting, naturally enough, with a project's champion, this faith can spread throughout the organization, leading everyone to believe collectively in the product's viability and to view any signs of impending doom merely as temporary setbacks. This phenomenon is documented here in two chillingly detailed case studied, one involving Essilor, the world's largest maker of corrective lenses for eyeglasses, and the other involving Lafarge, the largest producer of building materials. By counterexample, they point the way toward avoiding such morasses: assembling project teams not entirely composed of like-minded people and putting in place--and sticking to--well-defined review processes. Both cases also show that if it takes a project champion to get a project up and running, it may take a new kind of organizational player--an "exit champion"--to push an irrationally exuberant organization to admit when enough is enough.     

Managing for creativity

A company's most important asset isn't raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It's creative capital--simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. But how do you accommodate the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process while increasing efficiency, improving quality, and raising productivity? Most businesses haven't figured this out. A notable exception is SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. SAS makes Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year. The company has enjoyed low employee turnover, high customer satisfaction, and 28 straight years of revenue growth. What's the secret to all this success? The authors, an academic and a CEO, approach this question differently, but they've come to the same conclusion: SAS has learned how to harness the creative energies of all its stakeholders, including its customers, software developers, managers, and support staff. Its framework for managing creativity rests on three guiding principles. First, help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions. Second, make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminate arbitrary distinctions between "suits" and "creatives". And third, engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products. Underlying all three principles is a mandate to foster interaction--not just to collect individuals' ideas. By nurturing relationships among developers, salespeople, and customers, SAS is investing in its future creative capital. Within a management framework like SAS's, creativity and productivity flourish, flexibility and profitability go hand in hand, and work/life balance and hard work aren't mutually exclusive.     

Combining creativity and control: Understanding individual motivation in large-scale collaborative creativity

Recent research has shown that management control systems (MCS) can improve performance in contexts characterized by high levels of task uncertainty. This seems to conflict with a second stream of research, which argues that MCSs risk undermining the intrinsic motivation needed for effective performance in such settings. To solve this puzzle, we build on theories of perceived locus of causality and self-construal and develop an integrative model summarized in 15 propositions. To explicate our proposed solution and to show its robustness, we focus on the class of activities we call large-scale collaborative creativity (LSCC) - contexts where individuals face a dual challenge of demonstrating creativity and embracing the formal controls that coordinate their creative activities with others’. We argue that LSCC requires the simultaneous activation of intrinsic and identified forms of motivation, and simultaneously independent and interdependent self-construals. Against some scholarship that argues or assumes that such simultaneous combinations are infeasible, we argue that they can be fostered through appropriate attraction-selection-attrition policies and management control systems design. We also show how our propositions can enrich our understanding of motivation in other settings, where creativity and/or coordination demands are less pressing.     

America's looming creativity crisis

The strength of the American economy does not rest on its manufacturing prowess, its natural resources, or the size of its market. It turns on one factor--the country's openness to new ideas, which has allowed it to attract the brightest minds from around the world and harness their creative energies. But the United States is on the verge of losing that competitive edge. As the nation tightens its borders to students and scientists and subjects federal research funding to ideological and religious litmus tests, many other countries are stepping in to lure that creative capital away. Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and others are spending more on research and development and shoring up their universities in an effort to attract the world's best--including Americans. If even a few of these nations draw away just a small percentage of the creative workers from the U.S., the effect on its economy will be enormous. In this article, the author introduces a quantitative measure of the migration of creative capital called the Global Creative-Class Index. It shows that, far from leading the world, the United States doesn't even rank in the top ten in the percentage of its workforce engaged in creative occupations. What's more, the baby boomers will soon retire. And data showing large drops in foreign student applications to U.S. universities and in the number of visas issued to knowledge workers, along with concomitant increases in immigration in other countries, suggest that the erosion of talent from the United States will only intensify. To defend the U.S. economy, the business community must take the lead in ensuring that global talent can move efficiently across borders, that education and research are funded at radically higher levels, and that we tap into the creative potential of more and more workers. Because wherever creativity goes, economic growth is sure to follow.     

Beyond postnormal times: The future of creativity and the creativity of the future

Creativity and imagination are the most important ingredients for coping with post-normal times, according to Sardar. This paper looks at the way creativity itself is being transformed in the West, from the individualistic/atomistic view of Modernity towards a more contextual, collaborative, complex approach. It explores the potential and possibilities for this more participatory creativity to help go beyond the “crisis of the future,” and argues that the centrality of creativity must go beyond the mythology of genius and inspiration to inform philosophy, ethics, and action. Philosophical reflection and the imagination of desirable futures can emerge from a creative ethic that stresses the value of generative interactions and contexts that support creativity.     

The weird rules of creativity

For at least the past decade, the holy grail for companies has been innovation. Managers have gone after it with all the zeal their training has instilled in them, using a full complement of tried and true management techniques. The problem is that none of these practices, well suited for cashing in on old, proven products and business models, works very well when it comes to innovation. Instead, managers should take most of what they know about management and stand it on its head. In this article, Robert Sutton outlines several ideas for managing creativity that are clearly odd but clearly effective: Place bets on ideas without much heed to their projected returns. Ignore what has worked before. Goad perfectly happy people into fights among themselves. Good creativity management means hiring the candidate you have a gut feeling against. And as for the people who stick their fingers in their ears and chant, "I'm not listening, I'm not listening," when customers make suggestions? Praise and promote them. Using vivid examples from more than a decade of academic research to illustrate his points, the author discusses new approaches to hiring, managing creative people, and dealing with risk and randomness in innovation. His conclusions? The practices in this article succeed because they increase the range of a company's knowledge, allow people to see old problems in new ways, and help companies break from the past.     

应用虚拟机杀毒引擎解决病毒加壳难题

在好莱坞间谍电影里，那些特工们往往以神奇莫测的化妆术来欺骗别人，甚至变换成另一个身份，国内对于这种伪装行为有个通俗的说法——“穿马甲”。这种正与邪的争斗已经延伸到了计算机病毒领域，很多病毒作通过给病毒“穿马甲”，甚至穿多个“马甲”的方式，躲避杀毒软件的查杀，这种技术就是“加壳”。[第一段]     

升值之言该如何听

自今年6月中国暗示将松动人民币汇率以来,人民币升值幅度仅为0．4％,这大大低于华盛顿的期待,因此,中美两国的关系日益紧张起来。随着失业率的膨胀,以及选举年即将到来,美国国会再一次将人民币汇率摆上了议事日程：9月6日,华盛顿两位高官为缓和中美关系前往北京,就人民币及其他重要问题进行高峰会晤,以期达成共识。     

如何把服务业政策落到实处

与《意见》的出台同样引起关注的是《意见》的实施和落实。北京将会有什么样的措施来保证《意见》的实施呢?对于《意见》的进一步落实,徐逸智向记者谈了他的想法。     

如何做好自动柜员机的管理工作

自动柜员机是一种集计算机技术、自控技术、安全技术于一身的精密程度极高的机电一体化自助设备。为了弥补营业网点数量不足、缓解柜面压力、降低银行经     

监管新命题

"你站在桥上看风景,看风景人在楼上看你."这句卞之琳在1935写的两句诗,对那些在证券市场上淘金的上市公司很适合:投资人在炒你的股票,你在炒其他公司的股票.     

How to build a blockbuster

Coming up with fabulously successful products takes more than creative people with groundbreaking ideas. Top executives need to roll up their sleeves and get involved. Since they control resources and have the power to cut through red tape, they can clear a path for the creative team to develop hit products.     

如何有效管理商业银行操作风险

近来,国内各商业银行的重大操作风险事件频发,引起监管部门的重视,银监会就此提出了加强商业银行操作风险管理的十三条意见。操作风险对于商业银行来说并非新问题,但对其进行有效管理则始终是一项重要任务。     

如何优化数据库系统

银行信息系统投入运行以后,随着业务量的不断积累,系统中保存的业务数据也逐渐增多,原来运行速度良好的系统就会随之发生运行缓慢、响应时间增长的问题。这就要求维护人员跟踪运行时间较长的业务处理过程,运用各种技术手段进行系统优化,但是从优化效果来看,往往不尽人意。     

如何计量公允价值

现行国际财务报告准则关于公允价值计量的规定散落在不同的具体准则之中,不具有一致性,有时甚至是自相矛盾的。2011年5月,国际会计准则委员会发布了IFRS13号准则:公允价值计量。作为唯一单独规范公允价值计量的准则,IFRS13修订了公允价值的定义,建立了统一的公允价值计量和披露规则。本文对IFRS13做了简单介绍,以期为IFRS13在我国企业的落地实施提供参考。     

How to cultivate engaged employees

Everybody knows that an empowered team enhances everyone's performance, including the manager's. Vlachoutsicos, of the Athens University of Economics and Business, argues that the vital, particular ingredient in buoying employees is fostering a sense of mutual dependence, or "mutuality," every time you interact with subordinates. He offers six lessons in achieving mutuality: 1. Be modest. Specifically, avoid talking about your track record and instead focus on your people's present needs. 2. Listen seriously--and show it. Don't assume that folks recognize how attentive you are. Make sure the outward signs reflect it. 3. Invite disagreement. But deliver the invitation artfully so that people really do pipe up. 4. Focus the agenda. Don't let discussion run amok in the name of openness. Streamline it so that the progress is palpable to all participants. 5. Don't try to have all the answers. See yourself more as a catalyst for problem solving than as a problem solver per se. 6. Don't insist that a decision must be made. Give the decision-making process time to breathe, even if that sometimes means delaying a conclusion. The author richly illustrates each of these lessons with a compelling story from his lifelong experience.     

处置"不良"的技术分析

如何根据不良的资产特点,正确把握处置时机,灵活运用各种资产处置方式,积极探索资产处置的技术难点,科学设计资产处置程序和资产交易结构,从而加快资产处置进度,最大限度地减少损失,努力提高资产回收率和变现率,是我国金融资产管理公司全面完成使命与进一步发展中面临的一系列重要技术问题.