Episode 5: Connecting

The Seven C’s of Creative Leadership

By Tony Vengrove

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Welcome to Episode 5 of The Seven C’s of Creative Leadership!  Today, we discuss the fourth C: Connecting. One of the most important tasks of the creative leader is to connect complementary brains together in order to foster collaboration and bring diverse perspectives to the table. Creative leaders have the confidence and are secure enough to let others come up with the brilliant ideas. They will devote the necessary time to create great teams, they’ll do what it takes to support them, and most of all, they realize when it’s time to get out of the way.

Author Max Mckeown is our special guest for this topic. Having just interviewed many, many leaders for his new book, The Innovation Book, Max provides a ton of insight on how creative leaders can leverage the power of connecting to build a bigger collective brain. Highlights from our interview with Max include:

• To really foster innovation, you need a playful side, your inner child, to come out.
• Sometimes, the reasons innovation and connecting don’t work is that you’re not having fun, and you’re not providing enough time to let ideas flourish.
• The differences between open innovation, top-down innovation, and bottom-up innovation.
• Discovering the blocks that are culprits behind anti-innovation cultures.
• The bigger brain and its untapped potential. The importance of investment in building a bigger collective brain.
• How Connecting makes this all possible!

As Max states in our conversation, everyone has a creative playful side to them; it’s a side that most everyone wants to express more of at work. When creative leaders can tap into this insight, they have extraordinary power to unleash to creative thinking and rally people together to solve tough problems.

The Innovation Book is now available and I highly recommend it! As someone who sat in a corporate innovation leadership role, it’s the kind of book I would have bought for everyone on my team. The book not only explains innovation from a process perspective, but addresses many creative leadership principles that are critical for developing a more innovative and creative culture. I also love the “innovator’s toolkit” section where Max brilliantly curates a selection of tools and models to utilize during various stages of the innovation journey.

Join us next week for Episode 6 as we invite Tim Murphy, VP Digital & Media at Pernod Ricard to discuss Culture.  Tim will share how a large multi-national organization with an iconic brand portfolio works hard to maintain its creative culture.

You can follow the show and listen to archived episodes at our official landing page at Business in the Morning.

Miles Finch Innovation helps companies navigate the messy territory of corporate innovation. We’re strategic thinking partners who can help you get unstuck and identify creative solutions to your toughest challenges. We also love to train and speak on the subject of Creative Leadership. Email us or call us at 860-799-7505 to learn how we can help you you unlock the creative potential of your employees.