How to Kill Creativity in 10 easy steps!
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This document provides a satirical list of 11 ways for managers to stifle creativity and innovation in their organizations. It suggests embracing new ideas without implementing them, taking credit for others' ideas, creating barriers between groups, pretending to know more than employees, micromanaging work, withholding praise, and over-emphasizing bureaucracy. The overall message is a critique of authoritarian management styles that inhibit new thinking.
How to Kill Creativity in 10 easy steps!
- 1. Based on Managing & Organizations - Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis (2005)
- 2. 10: When the proposed idea is not radical enough, just say that the idea is not really new – and that someone else already did it Pet Shop Boys: Actually (1987)
- 3. 9: When the proposed idea is too radical, you can always argue that no one has done it before – and that there might be reasons for this
- 4. 8: Embrace new ideas when you talk, but do not do anything about them
- 5. 7 Be the exclusive spokesperson for every new idea, regardless of whether it is your own or not
- 6. 6: Never talk to employees on a personal level, except for annual meetings – at which you praise your social and communicative leadership skills
- 7. 5: Create boundaries between decision-makers, technical staff, and creative minds. Make sure that they speak different languages
- 8. 4: Always pretend to know more than anybody around you. Especially be suspicious when people from below come up with ideas. You know better!
- 9. 3:Make sure that creative staff do a lot of technical and detailed work. Make sure that they do their own bookkeeping, and count everything you can count as often as possible
- 10. 2: Run daily checks on the progress of everyone’s work. Be critical (they love it!) and withhold positive feedback, which would only encourage them to do things that are potentially dangerous
- 11. 1: Police your employees by every procedural means that you can devise. Insist that they stick to the rules of good old bureaucracy and fill in many forms that need to be signed by almost every senior manager in the organization