Business requires creative thinking to drive innovation and growth, not to mention future sustainability. But where do you start and how do you facilitate it? How do you actually use creative thinking in business, and what are the advantages of using it in the workplace?
Who is answering our creative thinking questions? Multi-award winning Chris Gotz: National Executive Creative Director of Old Friends Young Talent, and former co-Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy SA. He also happens to be a Red & Yellow alumni.
Watch the short video below and you’ll quickly figure out how to bring creative thinking into business, and what the advantages of doing so are.
As one of our amazing alumni, we’re super proud to have played a role in Chris’s lustrous career. We happily note his track record of winning almost every local and international award and acknowledgement known to man (and woman). Something to aspire to? We think so.
P.S If you’re interested in learning more about creative thinking, we’ve got a 5 week Creative Thinking Course that may tickle your fancy.
Hello I’m Chris Gotz and I’m the National Creative Director of OFYT. And although lots of people know me and my guys as creative director at Ogilvy for about 15 years. Anyway I’m here now and I’m going to talk to you about creativity into a business and why it’s such an important force for change. And I guess I can only talk about my own perspectives and that will be very much be from a creative person trying to affect somebody else’s business. And the responses that I’ve had to my overtures and I think that to make a business susceptible to the power of of creative change whether it’s in your supply line or your marketing whether it’s the way you’re being perceived or your mission statement., is to let creative people into your business for a start. You know have I found, there’s a diverse range of relationships that occur with the creative suppliers to any business and you can be simply a supplier or you can be a real collegiate partner how can I best take my business and move it forward in the most creative way possible. How do I bring creativity to bear in my organization. Not with standing the fact that I have creative people who are working with me as partners and suppliers. I think that one, you have to be open to creative change in your organization.
But I think that secondly you have to hire people who will bring that attitude in. I’ve discovered that.
Building your organization or around the talents of the people in it as opposed to building an organizational structure and then just plugging people into the gaps and telling them what they’re supposed to do is a huge ,huge part of that. problem. And a lot of companies 95 percent of companies are just going t o go well I have my organogram I have my way of doing things and I’m not going to change that. And I think that in doing so you deny yourself access to a whole bunch of people who will question your organizations and in a whole lot of different ways.You would say well is that really creativity. Of course it is because you’re creating a role because someone has a talent that they can bring to bear on a business that wasn’t there before.
That’s actually helping the business. You know I think your ability to look up and down the line if you’re a business that produces a product is there where you can innovate around production is there where you can innovate innovate around delivery. That’s such a crucial conversation because the big disrupting. Tech companies. Are coming in and doing things differently doing things creatively changing the way the delivery mechanism works and really subverting the entire business model. And the only way you can fight against that is to be more creative in your organization.
Thanks very much. I hope it’s been useful. I felt like I was rambling a little bit but if you can grab one or two things out of that I think creativity isn’t. Necessarily restricted to things that we think are creative but also to just approaching problems from a completely different angle, and that’s what creativity is it’s finding different relationships between things that didn’t have relationships. Thanks.
