A recent article by Margaret Heffernan, on Fast Company’s Talent & Careers center, is entitled: Creativity is in the Detail, and Everywhere…. She makes an interesting observation that it is now creativity and innovation that is starting to eclipse globalization as a top concern of businesses.  Organizations wonder: how will we come up with the next big idea?

Heffernan disputes the myths that creativity is limited to a few gifted people, or that it only comes naturally and can’t be taught. She tells a story about a business leader who "threw away his Blackberry and went walking across New England for three weeks," and found a profound source of creativity int he process.

He was surprised to discover that his journey became more meaningful when he stopped worrying so much about his destination, and simply relished the journey. It may sound too philosophical for some, but with so much talk about how we reach our business destinations, I believe there is some value in paying attention to how we arrive there.

Heffernan asks: "Are we sometimes (perhaps even all the time) too focused on getting
work done to extract any value from the experience of doing it?" I have asked myself the same question. In my own experience, the more I focus on accomplishing the details of work, the less meaningful work I get accomplished.

I happened to address this question during a recorded interview to The Student Operated Press:

What key quality would you say that all successful people share?

I think in terms of management and executives, I think executives that are too busy are probably not very successful. In my case, the more time I spend with our employees, the more time I spend with our customers, the more time I spend with partners, talking, discussing, eating, or just spending time on my own, figuring out where the company can be more successful, the more successful I am.

The more time I spend doing things micromanaging or following up on little things, and being extremely busy from very early morning until late at night, the less successful the company is.

One of my biggest jobs as a CEO is to be a model to project workforce managers at all levels of my organization. I do this by allowing our people and teams to do their jobs, and paying attention to the success of our common journey.