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Creativity is the result of the marriage of logic and imagination.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

[this push for creativity], it's all so completely phony. Look at education: There's this horrible homogenization going on - everybody has got to be special. So if it's somebody's birthday in grade school, then you have to celebrate everybody's birthday, all year long. Everyone gets absolutely equal treatment; nobody is allowed to stick out—whether it's because they are behaving badly or are brilliantly smart. Everyone has to be of equal value intellectually, artistically, and creatively; it makes me want to scream. There's this irrepressible drive toward mediocrity; everything seems to be degenerating into a kind of middlebrow "world-class."

It's important to distinguish between creativity and art. The most common form of creativity is problem solving: You can't get the truck through the tunnel, so you let the air out of the tires. I presume that businesspeople are very good at this kind of creativity...

By contrast, art depends on whether you can invent something from very little... Of course, skill and learning are also involved, but art goes beyond skill.

Traditional analytical models of decision-making, while appropriate for evaluating choices for which there are ample historical data, can often kill off creative ideas that might be extremely valuable.

when creative people are performing a task, if the extrinsic reasons for engaging in the task are more important than the intrinsic reasons, they will tend to perform less creatively. Outside factors encourage people to focus purely on the accuracy and consistency of the outcome; while the task may be accomplished, creativity is blocked and interest in the activity stifled. This is not to say that creativity can be promoted by eliminating compensation for performance - the most salient extrinsic factor.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

What is the biggest obstacle to creativity? Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

If every valuable creative idea is logical in hindsight, then it is only natural to suppose, and to claim, that such ideas could have been reached by logic in the first place and that creativity is unnecessary. That is the main reason why, culturally, we have never paid serious attention to creativity.

Bear in mind that creativity is not coming up with an idea out of nowhere; it's an act of synthesis, of bringing together several things into a novel combination. Creativity is something in service to innovation; it's not innovation itself. And again, it's hard work.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Change is not about understanding new things or having new ideas; it's about seeing old things with new eyes -- from different perspectives. Change is not about reorganizing, reengineering, reinventing, recapitalizing. It's about reconceiving! When you reconceive something -- a thought, a situation, a corporation, a product -- you create a whole new order. Do that, and creativity will flood your mind.

Nothing in the business world is more overrated than a "good idea." Nothing. I've never gone into an organization anywhere in the world that didn't have-with a little prompting and encouragement-more good ideas than it could possibly use. Indeed, most firms enjoy a surplus-a glut-of good ideas. As a rule, a glut of something makes it less valuable, not more. Economics 101.

By contrast, I've never gone into an organization where the process of implementing good ideas was fast, cheap, easy and successful. There seems to be a terrible scarcity-a corporate famine-of good implementations.

Simply put, good ideas are cheap; good implementations aren't.

Imagination is a vantage point of the future from which we can consider that which is lacking in the present.

If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure - and the only kind that deserves to be punished. Researcher Dean Keith Simonton provides strong evidence from multiple studies that creativity results from action. Renowned geniuses like Picasso, da Vinci, and physicist Richard Feynman didn't succeed at a higher rate than their peers. They simply produced more, which meant that they had far more successes and failures than their unheralded colleagues. In every occupation Simonton studied, from composers, artists, and poets to inventors and scientists, the story is the same: Creativity is a function of the quantity of work produced. These findings mean that measuring whether people are doing something-or nothing-is one of the ways to assess the performance of people who do creative work. Companies should demote, transfer, and even fire those who spend day after day talking about and planning what they are going to do but never do anything.

Great creativity requires hard facts, wild imagination, and nonlogical jumps forward that are then proved to be right by working backward to known principles. Only the rebellious can do it.

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.

Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity over the somnambulistic vices of corporate conformity may actually be giving advice that in the end will reduce the creative animation of business. This is because they tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation-that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive's day-to-day problems; and underestimate the intricate complexity of business organizations....

The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people into a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves actually have. Almost anybody with the intelligence of the average businessman can produce them, given a halfway decent environment and stimulus. The scarce people are those who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas.

Advocacy of a "permissive environment" for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact: One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity.

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible -- by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we're fearful, we freeze up. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.

There are two qualities that usually determine a creative person's potential...curiosity and determination. The curious learn, grow, and develop potential. The determined have the resolve to overcome the obstacles they encounter on their way to fulfilling their potential.

Because of patent law, which exists to protect intellectual capital, we often think the value of an idea lies in its creation. Yet the value of an idea lies in the audience, not its source, and one idea can be ‘created' many, many times. Creativity exists in a chain: an idea comes from this group and goes to that group, and that group then carries it over to another group. An idea is a multiple sequence of creative acts. This is important because it means that creativity isn't just the domain of brilliant people, it's also the domain of average people who travel to other groups. The simplest way to feel creative is to find people more ignorant than you. Nobody knows that better than academics, who are constantly in the business of reading widely, coming up with ideas, then shipping them to groups unaware of the ideas.

Numerous people have studied the process that creative people go through to develop their ideas. Most of these students of creativity agree that ideas come from a subconscious process that takes two relatively unassociated thoughts and combines them together to produce a new thought-a new idea.

The creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you'll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this-and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting stories.

Finding support, whether emotional, financial, or intellectual, for a big new idea is very hard and depends on skills that have nothing to do with intellectual prowess or creative ability. That's a killer for many would-be geniuses: they have to spend way more time persuading and convincing others as they do inventing, and they don't have the skills or emotional endurance for it.

Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they will have a goÂ…they are not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is being creative. But what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we're running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said, 'All children are artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.'

My mantra is "Look for the Second Right Answer." This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years. Much of our educational system tries to teach us to look for the "one right answer."

I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, when I'm looking for information, this mantra tells me to go beyond the right answers that have worked in the past and look for others. When I'm trying to be creative, it playfully advises me to put my ideas in unusual contexts to give them new meanings.

When I'm evaluating concepts, it implores me not to get stuck in the negative, and not to fall in love with one particular approach. And, when I'm implementing ideas, it reminds me that if one idea doesn't work, a different one just might, and to act accordingly.

Don't fall in love with ideas. By ideas I mean: systems, marketing approaches, technologies, partnerships, whatever. Because as soon as you as you fall in love with one approach, you lose sight of other possibilities. ...Every right idea eventually becomes the wrong idea.

Opportunists are humble enough to realize that the random forces of nature are more powerful than themselves. That these random forces often conspire to make things ridiculously easy just as often as they conspire to create hurricanes and earthquakes. Most people realize that a lot depends on being in the right place at the right time. Very few realize that this situation is not the outcome of hard work or trying to identify and move to hotspots. It is the outcome of a cultivated ability at recognizing when you are randomly in the right place at the right time (which also implies that there must be a certain amount of deliberate randomness in your wandering through life).