Creativity = Leadership, Excitement, Happiness, Greatness, Business, Money
“Reality, it seems, is multiple, and tightly coupled to perception.” — Diana Slattery
If you ever read one book on leadership, strategy, management… or impactful life journeys in general , I recommend Robert Iger’s “The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company” (see on Amazon).
It is a book on how Disney became the greatest media organization in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its arsenal of intellectual properties. Disney’s value grew five times under Iger’s management, which is why he is also recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era.
The book resonates with me well — I believe that greatness is rooted in the creativity. The rest is just technical implementation.
Without creative ideas, there is no progress, innovation or motivation (incl. to attract and organize talented employees to pursue the common goal). People are hardwired to be inspired by something novel, exciting, meaningful or otherwise out of the ordinary patterns of “been there and done that”.
And that is exactly what Robert Iger pursued— constant innovation, talent acquisition, raising the bar, getting employees and customers excited, always searching for ways to do things differently and better. In other words: creative leadership.
Jason Silva, the modern-day philosopher, futurist, filmmaker and public speaker, has captured the idea perfectly in his Shots of Awe episode “What Makes a Good Leader?” :
“The more we understand the neurochemistry of lived experience, the more we realize that we don’t get to ever really sample any kind of objective reality. Reality is coupled to perception and perception can be mediated. Certain music can change the way we process a scene, a moment can seem truthful or dishonest depending on the tone, depending whether it’s cloudy or sunny, depending on the place in which you happen to dwell. Again, reality is mediated by perception, perception can be manipulated.
So, brilliant people, people who change the world, leaders are said to have this thing known as a realty distortion field. Steve Jobs was famous for it — his ability to distort, to italicize perception in his co-workers, to inspire somebody to see the world in a new way, to literally engage the attention of all these body-minds and present them an alternative universe, to suck them into your trans and literally engage them to probe the adjacent possible, the shadow future that hovers over the present that provides a map of all the ways the present can reinvent itself. That is what great leaders do! They distort reality! But there is nothing fake about it, because the distorted reality becomes real the moment that perception becomes the main operating system. The moment you adopt that vision as truth, it becomes truth. Mankind decided we will fly, it became truth. Somebody hallucinated all the current technologies into being. We live in a world where our thoughts spill over and if they can harness the will of people around us, we can labor new realities into being, we can usher new worlds into being, we can author realities, because we as human beings, our greatest potential is that we have this reality distortion field. We are like the Neo in the Matrix when he sees the code and he flexes his muscle and space and time warps around him. Powerful metaphor, but that’s who we are, that’s what we are.”
It is important to acknowledge that creativity is not science. This inherently means that the culture around creative leaders is bold, allowing people around them to experiment and fail without shame. Or as Robert Iger puts it:
“Don’t be in the business of playing it safe. Be in the business of crating possibilities for greatness”
