Entrepreneurs must take care not to kill creativity

Even though we generally think of entrepreneurs as progressive and their entrepreneurial companies as highly creative, the opposite might be true.

As Bill Dresselhaus, founder of a leading industrial design firm, has said, "(A) traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms and the dictates of the most recent ‘long range’ vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine."

You might ask, how can an entrepreneurial company be bureaucratic? How can a company that depends on changing the market fall into linear logic and conformance to norms?

The answer lies in three areas that can all contribute to either high creativity or to mediocre conformity: attitude, structure and practices.

By A. Brent Strong
Brigham Young University

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