Creative headaches

AT THE RISK of sounding like a shill for the Harvard Business Review (since I referenced it prominently in my last column), I feel compelled to cite it again this week. The August issue focused on the topic of innovation and featured a reprint from 1963 that contextualized my thinking on the role of the CTO in the current business environment.

The article is titled “Creativity is not enough,” and in it Theodore Levitt makes a fascinating proposition — that many creative “idea people” are actually a liability to their companies and can be a heavy burden to bear for an or oganization that actually wants to do something, not just talk about it. While I’ve never formally stated it quite this way, I have to admit that I’ve had similar thoughts about pure “idea people” in my career as I’ve watched organizations become suffocated with their ideas to the point of paralysis. From talking to other CTOs, I know that many of them have been in the same frustrating boat.

This is not to say that creativity is a bad thing in the corporate world. Creative thinking is as important as it has ever been, but as Levitt notes, “Since business is a uniquely ‘get things done’ institution, creativity without action-oriented follow-through is a uniquely barren form of individual behavior … in a sense, it is even irresponsible.” Levitt goes on to say that one of the prime requisites of business is action. Tossing out ideas constantly without a sense of what shape an implementation of the idea might take is sloppy at best, and “organizationally intolerable.” He offers two pieces of advice to the person with a new idea: 1. work in the situation as it is, and 2. suggest a new idea responsibly, and offer some indication of what the implementation would involve in terms of costs, risks, manpower, time, and even specific people to implement it.

In my first InfoWorld column, I quoted a Gartner white paper about the CTO role that dovetails nicely with Levitt’s emphasis on ideas combined with action for effective business execution. In that white paper, the CTO was called an “activator” who operates on the “action-oriented and tangible technological level on which the CTO helps to enable an enterprise’s ebusiness vision.”

To a large degree, the productive idea person posited by Levitt is the CTO or the equivalent in most organizations, since technology has become so fundamental to modern business. The CTO is the senior-level management team member who has the technology experience and understanding to turn amorphous business ideas into something that can be implemented.

There is a downside to the CTO’s acute awareness of what it takes to actually implement ideas. Since the CTO often serves as the reality check against poorly conceived ideas, he or she has to be careful to not come across as a roadblock — the person who says “can’t” a little too often.

In more dysfunctional organizations, the CTO and the technology staff can become the scapegoat for the nonaction-oriented idea person’s failure to implement ideas that are even minimally related to technology. You’ll hear the idea person say “we can’t do it because the technology isn’t ready,” when in fact, the business strategy behind the technology has never been sufficiently laid out. The idea person’s lack of follow-through has left too many loose ends for a technology implementation to be properly scoped. In these situations, the CTO must continually pressure his partners on the senior management team to collaborate with him on the project and bring the vision of the initially undisciplined idea to fruition. Turning ideas into true action is not simple, but the CTO should lead the way.