Reflection over the Creativity Module Articles

Jane Epstein has just become a manager at TechniCo. She's trying to get a fix on the various personalities and roles of her new coworkers, and by and large, she seems to have inherited a pretty good team. Something about Andy Zimmerman, though, has her worried. Andy is a kind of guy humiliates and insults other employees for minor mistakes; ruthlessly cuts down colleagues when they present ideas that aren’t fully developed, and makes everyone in the group feel small and stupid. But on the other hand he is a kind of guy notably good at his job; almost the best in the group. I believe Jane is very well aware of that leaving Andy out of the group would be no good for her group. However she also knows that tolerate Andy’s unacceptable behaviors will obviously have some undesirable consequences for the group too. Well, it seems that this kind of confrontations that Jane has to face come off often in many organizations. I believe that finding one-size-fits-all solutions for these kinds of confrontations is almost impossible. Also this is where one manager separates from one another. In the organization where I used to work, we had one Andy as well; he was the kind of guy prefers doing nothing but sitting in his office, you could have seen him rarely out of his office or talking to anybody. But alike our Andy was gifted too when we stuck in numbers. Though everything about him had to be complicated and problematic; every time when we needed his help, he criticized everything what we had been doing and demanded the work to be redone as the way he requested. Well as many might guess, that was driving us crazy. At first we tried to get along with him; invited him out to have some drink with us, he simply refused. Nevertheless we didn’t give up on him, called him at the breaks for a coffee, it didn’t work out. At times we had serious discussions; one could say we were at each other's throats! One might ask where the manager was standing on this picture. Well he was very well aware of what was going on however Andy was not the kind of guy easily bent his head over, he was literally stubborn. His rights were the universal ones according to his logic. Besides with his unique abilities he was not easily disposable. Eventually after some time things got seriously worsened. Nobody was talking to our Andy; neither was he. Finally the situation got unbearable, when the top management realized that the business started to get affected by the conflict through communication slowing downs, emerging a hostile atmosphere etc… our Andy was dismissed. Unfortunately even after his dismissal we couldn’t regain the peaceful environment back.

In the article The Weird Rules of Creativity. Sutton (2001) outlines several ideas for managing creativity that are clearly odd but somehow effective. Such ideas echoed by well-known scholars are being captured; like creative destruction by Schumpeter takes the form of ignoring what has worked before or pushing perfectly happy people into fights among themselves. The author discusses new approaches to hiring, managing creative people, and dealing with risk and randomness in innovation. I believe that these practices will broaden the companies’ views and guide them to look for alternative ways of getting innovative information and ideas then the traditionally way or past models.

And lastly I would like to reflect my opinions over the article called the MBA Admission Criteria and an Entrepreneurial Mind-Set: Evidence from “Western” Style MBAs in India and Thailand by Shepherd et al. (2008). The finding that Shepherd et al. (2008, 169) ‘an existing selection criterion for MBA admission —the GMAT— was negatively associated with the mind-set believed to be necessary for managerial success’ didn’t surprise me. In this week the study I made for the assignment to prepare the entrepreneurship literature debate made me come to conclusion that by not underestimating the importance of proper education, being entrepreneur has nothing to do with getting higher GMAT scores. What I believe is that the dynamics of the country living in and the culture carry much more importance. Being good at GMAT shows one that who he has capacity and capability to learn however apart from that doesn’t prove anything whether he has ability to be a good manager.