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The plague of compulsory creativity may be dying out

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Forget calling staff " imagineers" or "sandwich artists"; companies need more modest skills to evolve, says Lucy Kellaway

被求职者和用人单位大肆追捧的创造性，其实并不是大部分公司真正需要的。创造力强的的人有千奇百怪的点子，但可能不适合团队合作。商业公司需要的是能把点子付诸行动并创造盈利的人，执行力最重要。

I'm not creative, and neither most of my colleagues. The Financial Times employs clever people who know how to spot stories, write them elegantly and give readers the right mix of familiarity and surprise. Experience, knowledge, practice, judgement, skill and intelligence play a part, so does the ability to write and think. Creativity barely comes into it. This isn't to insult the FT, it's to compliment it.

For two decades, business people have talked rot about what it is to be creative. More creativity is taken to be better than less. There can be no such thing as too much.

On LinkedIn, there're nearly two million people with creative or creativity in their job title. And indeed, the job search websites, through 32,000 openings, specifying creativity in London alone, compared with only 2,700 requesting politeness, and barely 300 cooperativeness. This is baffling when you consider that being polite and cooperative a vital treats for every job I've ever heard of, whereas most companies have no use for real creativity at all.

The creativity plague has spread so fast that it's even reached the part which is used to be taboo, the Accounts Department. AstraZeneca （阿斯利康医药公司） , which is looking for someone to plan its cash flow, both in its advertisement about atmosphere which people are rewarded for their ideas and creativity.

Management expert has fining the fire by sillier and sillier research. The daftest, with written up the Harvard Business Review recently, recommended the companies give their staff ludicrous titles, like "imagineers", to make them more creative. Most worry only its single doubt for proving mention, the sandwich artist, who stuff turkey and process cheese into bread at subway. Not only that it's patralizing to expect these luckless workers to be cheered by such a moronic name, creativity is surely not what the company is after at the first place. When you're a global machine, they produces 4,800 subway sandwiches in a minute. Creativity on their production line is not recommended.

Last week, I came across the first sign that the creativity worship may have picked. Fast Company published an article entitled how to be less creative at work and why you some time should. It argued too much creativity can make you a nuisance to you boss, and it's often the smartest thing in businesses to forget new ideas and go on doing what is doing.

There're two extraordinary things about this. First to start, it's right. Secondly, it was published by an organization that more than any other has hyped this brainless trend.

Fast company's GBS mission, to inspire a new breed of innovative and creative thought leaders who are actively inventing the future of business.
It's possible that ordinary workers are starting to chief after two decades of compulsory creativity.

Last week, Kantar media, owned by WPP, invited all its employees to gathering rooms on different continents, and playing with Logo to construct their own versions of an extraordinary world. Did they find pretending to be kids with colorful bricks unleashed gale of creativity? Not all of them, one member of staff emailed me to tell me about the dismal day, writing on the subject line "The most nonsensical thing that ever happened in my work place".

The Merriam-Webster dictionary says creativity is the ability to make new things or think of new ideas. Through hardly any new ideas left, and most of them are very bad, or so new that ordinary people can't recognize them as good.

Van Gogh, after all, sold only one painting in his whole life. Those capable of genuine new idea is few far between. I only know two, one a poet, and the other an inventor. Both do things entirely their own way. Neither have much money. Neither would've lost 5 minutes in a cooperative job. They would hate it, and it would hate them.

To survive, companies need to change from time to time. They need to do things slightly differently from how they've done before. But for that, they don't need creativity, they need people with intelligence and judgement to work out the right variation on the existing ideas. More than that, they need people with determination to test those ideas, tweak accordingly and turn them into sales.