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The Hothouse Effect: Intensify Creativity in Your Organization Using Secrets from History's Most Innovative Communities by Barton Kunstler. AMACOM. 2004. 261 pages. Check price/buy book.
Building Creative "Hothouses" in Business
Every organization is capable of nurturing the creativity and
innovation that can lead to greatness, says a management professor.
Reviewed by Lane Jennings
n today's chaotic, troubled world, what chance does any group or business have to
become great? Not just well known or profitable, but recognized worldwide as a
source of creative innovations: useful new products and ideas that have a lasting impact
on how people think and live?
Barton Kunstler, a futurist, poet, and professor of management at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes that opportunities for greatness come to communities and organizations precisely at those moments when chaos and conflict threaten to overwhelm order and security. What's more, Kunstler believes, by carefully studying outstanding creative success stories both past and present, we can consciously design "hothouse" environments where high levels of innovative creativity can be sustained by many people over time.
In The Hothouse Effect, Kunstler examines moments in Western history when remarkable achievements in art, learning, government, and business practice occurred within a relatively short time centering on one particular place. His wide-ranging examples include Athens in the sixth century BCE, the Renaissance in Florence, the London of Shakespeare's time, and New York City's jazz scene in the mid-1940s and after.
Kunstler compares these well-documented Golden Ages with instances of outstanding creative achievement in business-oriented R&D, from the workshops of America's Thomas Edison and Germany's Bauhaus Design School to places like today's Loop Design Center in Bologna, Italy. From these comparisons, he identifies three dozen key factors that he believes help to form and sustain an environment in which creative individuals can flourish and cross-fertilize to produce insights and inventions that benefit society as a whole.
Some of these factors are commonly found in many successful organizations. Among these factors are a sense of mission, shared values that are lived rather than imposed, community-wide respect for achievement, and avoiding narrow specialization and a rigid management hierarchy. It is important to provide opportunities for colleagues at every level to share and exchange ideas.
But Kunstler also notes the importance of recognizing that personality conflicts offer opportunities for growth and of encouraging everyone to challenge and test accepted wisdom. Creative hothouses need to leave space for uncertainty and contradiction and not merely seek resolution for its own sake.
In any group where tolerance of diversity and sincere respect for high achievement co-exist, value clashes and ego conflicts can stimulate healthy competition and produce outstanding collective results. Without such tolerance and respect, individuals are forced to either conform or drop out, and the results are generally unsatisfying to all concerned. The same rule applies, Kunstler argues, whether the areas of disagreement involve theories in science, ideologies in politics, artistic differences, or the fundamental assumptions within a business firm. Continual challenge and testing of accepted wisdom is necessary to generate creative satisfaction for workers and bring useful innovations to the public.
Kunstler offers persuasive evidence for the different causal factors at work in a creative hothouse environment by shifting back and forth among historical examples, interviews with contemporary business leaders, and original scenarios of possible future developments. While his prose style throughout the book is relaxed and easy to read, the information he offers is often surprising. In particular, his insightful parallels between figures from different eras and specialties (such as the use of "language" in jazz and in Dante's The Divine Comedy) is a refreshing demonstration that creative hothouses have worked in the past, still operate today, and can be further developed in the future.
Inviting readers to consider the nature of creativity itself, Kunstler makes a strong case for the idea that any group or organization, no matter what its aims and objectives, can become a hub of creative activity by encouraging all its members to use their individual talents and interests in a common cause. The resulting rewards and profits not only benefit the inventors themselves, but also encourage and sustain the manufacturers, managers, and distributors without whom no innovation would reach the general public.
Two cynical responses to the challenge to become great are (1) Who defines greatness? and (2) Why bother? Isn't success (i.e., wealth) enough?
Kunstler effectively counters both of these objections: Greatness in the context of Kunstler's book might be defined as a win-win outcome that not only satisfies the momentary needs and desires of producers and consumers, but holds lasting value over time and remains valuable--if only as a model or a prototype--for future generations.
Kunstler concludes that the ultimate accomplishment of a creative hothouse is to produce beauty. Whether the thing produced is a tool, a piece of furniture, a mathematical formula, an artwork, or an act of legislation, all of these can be beautifully crafted, avoiding waste, inefficiency, and imbalance. And why bother creating beauty? The maker might say it's simply because it is more satisfying than creating ugliness; the futurist might say it's because it is more likely to endure.
In Kunstler's words: "If life on Earth ever reaches out to the stars, or if we ever attract visitors drawn down by our civilization ... it will be our creativity that will have changed the universe. Let's not sell it short."
About the Reviewer
Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, July-August 2004. Click here to order.
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