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This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster.
Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity.
As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.
Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want.
- Almost all business success relies on creativity. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives
- Despite the importance of creativity, there seems to be almost no focus on teaching it, encouraging it, training at it & incorporating it into our daily routines. The need for creativity extends well beyond product design.
- Many people are visual thinkers. Therefore to drive creativity people need to do visual brainstorming
- You need to find what works for you to put yourself in that environment and learn how to do “self talk,” learn how to create visual charts, learn how to test & iterate ideas and the learn how to effectively communicate results.
- For me I can only do this by myself. I think team sessions are better for testing ideas than for original thought, but that’s me. Solitude & creativity go hand-in-hand.
- I use tools to invoke my creatieve self. One example is driving, which has an actual physiological reason it makes you creative. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward
- One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain” was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. It’s a book about creating art but shows how an artist’s mind gets “into the zone,” how creativity can be invoked, and why looking at what you create in a different way than the rational mind would conceive is an important part of creativity. She literally encourages you to draw things upside down.
- Other ways I drive creativity are time pressure, showers & occasionally wine. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above. For others they swear by music. I personally find music more distracting than helpful.
- Adding structure to creativity is not an oxymoron. It’s how you codify your ideas
- Like anything, creativity takes practice. There’s no such thing as “not being a creative person.” Some people are more creative than others but it’s within us all. You just have to dedicate yourself to a wanting to tap your creative juices.
- I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it. These are all creative processes.
- Visualization is a well known technique in professional sports where the difference between winning & losing is often psychological more than physical. If it can work for them, it can work for you.
THE DETAILS
What exactly is visualization? – It is exactly as it sounds. The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind. When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words. I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.
It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience. I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age and their interests. I look carefully at who is speaking before me. In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.
When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.
Strange, I know. But for many people the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self talk. Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result I seldom hear leaders talk about it. So I thought I would.
Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.
It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup. And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers and virtually anybody involved in business leadership. Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design. That’s a shame.
Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place. It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing. It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve. Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happend rather than imagining what could be.
When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone. I imagine myself saying my opening line and put myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.
There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity. And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.
