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Jacqueline McLean believes that, by adopting creative thinking throughout the organisation, managers will overcome the challenges of this era of turbulence and change.
As each day passes, the world continues to experience ubiquitous and unprecedented change. The stability of the classical era has been replaced by the chaos, turbulence, complexity and competitiveness of the 21st Century. To survive in this bonkers, paradoxical era, many business leaders have had to think differently - dare I say it, 'outside the box'. More creative management and organisational paradigms, such as the boundaryless organisation, network structures and global virtual teams, have become the norm in many societies around the world.
Like it or not, we have to move with the times and our major challenge, as we progress further into the millennium, will be to keep up with the pace at which these changes are occurring and become more creative in the ways in which we manage organisations, work practices, teams and, indeed, ourselves.
What is Creativity?
Gurteen (1998:2) defines creativity as "the process of generating ideas." He advocates that innovation is quite distinct from creativity and describes it as the implementation of ideas generated via the creative process. Importantly, he recognises that creativity and innovation "concern the process of creating and applying new knowledge" (p1). Such knowledge is then used to, not only inform the development of new products and services, but also to enable the organisation to learn better and faster...