Do You Have a High Creative Quotient?
- Mar 19, 2015
- 4 min read
Human beings are naturally creative so it’s funny that most companies try to stiffer that creativity with rules and regulations. This often leads to what I call the ‘Zombie syndrome’ where a company hires a person’s body but not their mind.
Most companies do this unintentionally of course, but people who aren’t allowed to express their creativity at work become disengaged and alienated from management. They feel their opinions or feelings don’t’ really matter.
Creative expression doesn’t have to be anything huge but from a management perspective might be allowing a person to dress the way they want at work, or perhaps it’s decorating the office with art or, in a restaurant, drawing a personalized message on a menu board.
The Doodlers Shall Inherit the Earth
Google is famous for allowing its employees to embrace their creativity, giving their employees time to work on their own projects even if they don’t relate directly to Google’s business goals. Their Google doodles on their home page are legendary.
In 2010, one of Google’s projects was to redefine what a music video was— because, let’s face it, with all types of modern technology the basic music video hasn’t changed much since MTV.
They created what was the Wilderness Downtown Project with Arcade Fire (one of my favourite bands) which is an interactive multimedia presentation. When you go to the website and input your address and it shows in various pop-up videos a man running towards your home. You can then write a postcard that you can share.
Now obviously this hasn’t revolutionized music videos – at least not yet, but perhaps it will one day. Perhaps it will revolutionize films as we know it and motion pictures will be more like those Choose Your Own Adventure novels you read as a kid.
Of course Google can afford to experiment if they want. With all the money they are making they could just simply choose to give it to their investors.
Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems
But sometimes not having money forces people to think creatively in the workplace.
It makes companies to think differently, to think outside the box.
Many start-ups such as Dropbox, Hotmail, Facebook and AppSumo use growth hacking to market their product. Growth hacking was invented out of necessity because start-ups don’t have a lot of money to advertise.
If you don’t know, growth hacking is essentially getting customers to do all the marketing for the company by giving them perks such as free storage or discounted rates in return for referring a friend to their service.
If you sign up for any social media platform what is the first thing it does? It finds your friends that are already on that platform and gets you to email anybody who isn’t signed up, inviting them to join.
It’s brilliant.
This type of marketing, although has new terms, has essentially been around since marketing was invented.
Newsjacking is trying to get media to cover your company – hijacking the news – just like the old PR firms used to do.
But you also don’t need to be a technology company to use the same principles.
For example a company called GetLoaded connects truckers with suppliers across the country and uses creativity to solve its problems. When they started out they didn’t have the advertisement budget to reach their target market across the nation.
What they discovered was that a trucking trade publication wasn’t using all their ad space and so the company owner reached out to the publisher and negotiated a deal where he would pay based on the revenue the ads generated.
The owner estimated he was able to get over $50,000 in free advertisement that way.
What is Your Creative Quotient?
People talk a lot about IQ and more frequently EQ but rarely do people talk about Creative Quotient.
This can because creativity can be hard to measure. There is no real scale, no set of questions you can come up with that will measure CQ effectively.
But the other reason is creativity often gets a bad name: creative people are dreamers, they don’t work hard, and they don’t follow directions very well. But the problem doesn’t lie with the person with the high CQ but with the person managing their work.
A person with a high CQ can be difficult to engage but once they are, the possibilities are endless and everyone in the company benefits.
CQ is an important aspect of any successful entrepreneur and more start-ups.
But they can also be used in established, blue chip business. In fact, those are the businesses that most often need creativity to stay competitive and fresh.
Companies need to start paying more attention to a person’s CQ and embrace it rather than stifle it.
Joel Mark Harris is a Canadian writer, marketer and speaker. (@joelmarkharris)
He is the proud founder of Scene2Studio and you can download for FREE his award-winning thriller novel A Thousand Bayonets HERE
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