​​​​Christopher Sopko

Nurturing the creativity of your team is a must if an organization wants to be successful, or remain successful over the long run.  Even if you have an outstanding product that is selling like "hot cakes" you will still need to develop it further or create a replacement product if you want to remain competitive.  The people and organizations you are selling against are not stupid, they see what you are offering and they are applying their most creative people to come up with a better version. 

This is what competition and capitalism is all about.

Hiring people that have a creative streak will pay huge dividends to every organization.  You need people that are constantly looking at situations and trying to figure out what can be done better to improve things.  Every person in an organization should be encouraged to look around and offer suggestions on what can be fixed or changed to make things more efficient or better.  

It is creativity and vision that drives innovation, and innovation is the key to success.  

At one of my previous companies a major part of our business was selling commodity consumable items to industrial laboratories throughout the US and Canada.  For many, many years sales were won on who could provide these consumable products in the least expensive fashion.  Thankfully, one very creative person in our head office decided to re-invent the technology and it immediately began to dominate the market.  At first our competitors created every excuse known to man in order to convince people that our new technology would not work, but over time they realized that they were fighting a losing battle.  Now, every one of the competitors in that market place offer a similar technology.  The great thing, is that due to the creativity of one person we were able to capture a dominant position within the market for a number of years while our competitors played "catch-up".

One of the most important examples of creativity creating success was demonstrated by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau who in 1990 developed a hypertext product called the World Wide Web (WWW).  Many people believe that this was the beginning of the internet, but this is a misnomer because the internet was actually created in 1969 by members of ARPANET.  For 21 years the internet existed in virtual obscurity and only used by highly technical people. It was the creativity and drive of Lee and Cailliau who envisioned what “might be” and put the tools in place that gave us this wonderful tool that we now all use on a daily basis.   Imagine what our world would be like if these two individuals did not have the creative genius to make an existing tool more useable.

Be creative.  Be successful.  Be great!