About those 6 Myth of Creativity, just to be balanced and more fair than Fast Company (apparently) I have just one thing to say about this work by Teresa Amabile, and yes, I am pitting my pitiful place in the trasheap against that of none other than the head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, but I still have just this to say: Cirque du Soleis

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types - I really don't think a highly creative endeavour like the Cirque would consider hiring just anyone; it is true that everyone, even the very least and most mentally challenged of us, is still a powerhouse of creative reasoning in some domain, but I don't think it's fair to say all New-Age-y like that Everyone is creative or that there are no 'creative people' because there are
2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator - and you have to keep these highly creative people. Although they can also be wooed by power, freedom and flattery, those are just different currencies of money. That's one side, and another is you can get really creative with massive budgets provided you have the freedom to use it. In my experience, the common motivator is in granting them real authority over their domain.
3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity - goes without saying, they announce a show, a very big show, and they work to curtain time. The show must go on is not just a pretty phrase in show biz, it's the law and having been in shows from small coffee houses to Ice House performances at Toronto's DuMaurier, let me tell you, it's not an empty phrase either. You get very creative in those final hours before the premier.
4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs - look at these stunts: hurling dancers through rings of fire in rapid succession and crossing paths ... I'm certain the fear of injury or worse is a very good motivator, and probably because it is not bogus business-career fear, but real and present danger to one's person.
5. Competition Beats Collaboration - ok, I might have to grant this one because my ponly experience is in the behind the scenes films and clearly there is a lot of collaborative dialog that goes on in these shows.
6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization - here again, simple stage economy, an organization like the Cirque cannot afford extraneous people because they squeeze every last dollar to put on a show and the play is the thing -- if there's a place to be trimmed, it gets trimmed, but the thing is, because the entire troupe agrees on the outcome of the group effort it is much easier to see where to cut.

Now, back to the Harvard Biz school and their use of science, what could have gone wrong? Like most Biz-school pronouncements, which are not dissimmilar to many other soft-science applied humanities, the first flaw is the same as mine above: All data is anecdotal, but held forth as definitive -- they could pull anecdotes out of their bowler hats all day, and I could pull another gaggle of artists or thespians out of mine and we could go on until we both fell off our barstools proving nothing more than the force of gravity on fools.

True, they did a careful statistical survey over an unimagnably small and slanted population sampling, so, the biz-meisters will say, this identifies not facts but trends and therein I will say this is all well and good and is their second and even more damning methodology flaw:

Once you compile your observations and can statistically formulate a working hypothesis, you must execute an experiment to verify (or falsify) your reasoning.

This, of course, has been left by our esteemed author and our honourable slick magazine editorial staff as an exercise for the untrained amateur reader who will, depending on their personal alignments to FastCo and Harvard Biz perceptual modes, either find this image of Jesus in the stained bricks of the donut shop wall, or not.

You may consider this one the First Myth of Business School Report Findings: trends are not causal proofs. The Second to Twelfth Myths are left as an exercise for the reader ...