How To Foster Creativity

Here are some great tips and guiding principles for how a manager and leader can build a culture to foster creativity.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.
If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them.
The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

Thanks author Ed Catmull for these tips and great new book, Creativity, Inc.

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