You are a creative. Notice I didn’t say “If” you are a creative. We are born creative beings. For some, our environment and education has suppressed our creative awareness. For others, we’ve been blessed to be around other creatives and been placed in situations where we had to exercise our imagination to survive. My website’s name is testimony to my concern and resulting passion to revive the creative spirit in myself and others. Like a hospital patient, our world, business and families need an infusion, a steady drip of creativity. But to help that process along, I’ve found a booster shot.

I have the most amazing opportunity this fall. I am honored to be presenting at Story 2017. When you go to their website, you will be amazed at beauty and awe of what they properly describe as an uncommon creative community.

On Sept. 21-22 in Nashville, they will be holding their annual conference. I attended last year. And while people say things like this as an exaggerated superlative, those two days changed my life. As a Chief Storyteller for IBM, I have the privilege of attending and speaking at a large number of conferences. Without a doubt, Story 2016 was the most impactful conference I have ever attended. Some conferences have great topics and speakers. Others have great venues. Some are a showplace for the atmosphere of sets, music and themes. While some are just a unique gathering of characters that you don’t want to miss. Story has all of this.

It’s not even close to the real experience, but you can get a taste from this highlight video of Story 2016.

The Story 2017 theme is Carnival of Curiosity. Go to their website. Be curious. Look around and see what you can discover. And don’t let the low-ticket price fool you. Most of the corporate events I attend have prices 4 and 5 times that of Story. But those are playing to the senior executive at large organizations with a deep budget. I deeply appreciate Story’s love for the art and craft which drives them to make sure even the individual storyteller has the opportunity to attend. By the way, if you’re an aforementioned corporate exec with deep pockets, consider purchasing a box of seats and offering them to your creative customers. They will love you for it.

If you have any questions, contact Story or ask me. I may not know the answer, but I can probably find someone who does. And if you decide to attend, let me know. I’d love to meet you there.

BTW…I don’t know how long this will last, but if you go to storygatherings.com/about/ you can discover a coupon code for a $100 discount on the Story 2017 ticket price.

Story matters!

Several years ago I was introduced to a little book titled “Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace”. It’s only available in hardcopy and there is a good reason, it’s filled with little doodles and art from the author, Gordon MacKenzie. In the 224 pages, Gordon describes his journey as a creative in a corporate environment.

It would be unfair to go much further about my own journey without describing the concept of orbiting a hairball. And to do that, I’d like to use Gordon’s explanation (page 33):

Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mind set, beyond “accepted models, patterns, or standards”—all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.

If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individuality to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape that pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball—to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

But if you allow that same gravity to suck you into the bureaucratic Hairball, you will find yourself in a different kind of nothingness. The nothingness of a normalcy made stagnant by a compulsion to cling to past successes. The nothingness of the Hairball.

That single page of text has changed my approach to being a creative in a large corporation.

I’ve had the pleasure of serving with more than a dozen companies in roles that span graphic art, software development, tech publishing, consulting, sales and marketing. The companies have ranged in size from 20 people to 400,000+ and crossed many industries. With the exception of a few, most of these companies held a common, yet unspoken tendency toward the safe harbor of normality. Standardized processes, procedures and policies were regarded as the ultimate destination for efficiency and profitability. While some served a purpose in time, most just became a hitching post to which tired and unimaginative people could tie themselves for safety.

I’m not much for hitching posts or safe harbors. Real life is on the trail and open seas. For that reason, I’ve always liked mantras over mission statements. You’ll get more from me if you give me guidelines rather than a set of rules. So in my zeal for creative freedom and unique impact I began to address issues in very different ways. After all, why should I attend weekly cadence calls (a corporate standard) when I could do more by taking that time to be in front of customers? Why even consider the standard messaging and assets coming from our product team when I knew I could produce and deliver better and more customer relevant materials?

But I learned that my approach—the “ask forgiveness rather than permission”, the “stand aside and let me show you how wrong you are” resulted in me and my work totally escaping the gravity of the Hairball and I found myself alone in the nothingness of space.

While I delivered on my goals, I was punished for not “owning it”, which is shorthand for “you didn’t align to our way”, so my accomplishments were ignored. And my approach was not a path to be followed because it led to discipline.

I serve on a worldwide team, so I serve our sales teams, business partners and customers. One desired outcome of my work was to bring others along—to help enable them in a way they could reuse or remix my materials to meet their needs. What I found was my presentations and sales materials proved to be so effective that I quickly became overwhelmed with requests to speak and work with customers. Mostly because I was the only one able to deliver the material I created. I use big pictures and few words in the actual presentation and rely on spending a great deal of time in preparation. Most of our sales reps are overwhelmed (many by Hairball requirements) and can’t, or don’t invest the time needed. So the assets I was creating were unusable by most of our sales teams.

I was so far outside the gravitational pull of the Hairball that much of my efforts were irrelevant.

I learned I needed to come in closer to the Hairball. Not become a part of it, but close enough to have impact. To do so I began looking at the corporate procedures I had mostly dismissed and examined them for creative ways I could leverage the better parts to remain within the spirit of the Hairball. I found I didn’t have to attend every meeting or conference call, but I did attend the most important ones.

I considered “why do we have meetings anyway?” and determined a significant benefit was the communication and awareness of activities among the leadership team. So I began using our corporate social network to document and share my work. This way managers could see what I was doing and my peers could leverage my work as well. I began developing content designed for “remix”. The resulting interaction has been a valued source of insights and feedback, which has resulted in more effective and reusable assets.

But the Hairball constantly changes. Companies like IBM reorganize often to fit the demands of an ever changing marketplace. And once again, IBM is defining a new era of Cognitive Computing. Add in cloud, digital sales and a host of other evolutionary business practices and you’ve got an ever adapting organization. As the organization changes, so must your orbital calculations. For me this has meant remaining flexible and observant to the changing infrastructure of the Hairball. Roles and departments I once counted on for gravitation pull could lose their significance and mass. I’m having to watch for new opportunities and markets that are reaching critical mass and sufficient enough to have the Gravity need for orbiters like me.

So if you feel you’re caught in the Hairball, it’s not too late. If you’re so far from the Hairball that you are irrelevant, there is hope. But in each case, it’s up to you to change—you, not the Hairball. The Hairball is NOT going to easily adapt to fit your style.

Elephants can dance, but they are still elephants. They’re fun dance partners, but watch your distance and mind your toes.

Happy Orbiting.

And I would encourage you to get a copy of MacKenzie’s book. It’s engaging and enlightening. It’s one of my most popular giveaway books. For anyone who knows me, you can tell why just by looking at the TOC.

April 22, 2013 – It was going to be my wife and I’s 35th wedding anniversary. Discussing our options for celebration, I was told that if I wanted a 36th anniversary, I should plan for a week off.

I serve in a worldwide capacity and have conversations and demands from a large number of individuals. These usually come in the form of emails, instant messages or phone calls…but most often emails. If you are like me, the thought of being gone for a week just caused visions of a swollen in-box that I’d have to suffer through on my return. That is when I decided to leverage our internal social business network.

At IBM we use Notes for email, so I crafted the following “Out of Office” notification:

“I’m out of the office from April 22-26. If you are an IBMer and reading this message, please be aware that I am not going to read your email…not while I’m gone or when I return. If your message was important, please post it on my profile page and I will address it on my return. If you are a customer, please note I will read and respond to your email.”

Then I went on a week’s vacation, totally “off the grid”. I didn’t take my PC or smartphone with me to triage emails. I didn’t sneak off to the corner somewhere to check in during the week. I didn’t care. I spent the week focusing on my family.

On my return, I sorted all the unread emails to locate those from IBMers. There were about 5 screens full, so somewhere around 300. I selected the top one, held the shift key, scrolled down and selected the last one. Then I hit “Delete”. I never looked at the titles, senders names, or topics. If they sent me an email, they saw my “out of office” message and knew what to expect.

I then went to my profile in our Social Business system (called IBM Connections). Of the 300 emails, only 29 turned into posts. And of those, 20 were already answered by people in my network. That is two thirds of my work being done for me. Like the following:

So after a week of vacation, I had only 9 issues from IBMers that needed my personal attention. That allowed me to focus on my customers.

And more importantly, if you look at the example above. The request for help came on April 23rd, the 2nd day of my vacation. And it was answered on April 23rd, the 2nd day of my vacation. For the requestor, they got their response without me. In fact, the responder knew more about the subject than I did anyway. So by asking “out loud” he was able to get a quicker response and better qualified answer.

But what if one of those emails was important? I’ve been taking this same approach every year and I’ve yet to delete an “important” email or be called out for not responding. Important things tend to come back around.

If you think you couldn’t possibly get away with doing something like this, then I would encourage you to ask “Why not?” Your fear of missing the 1 important thing out of 1000 emails is causing you to spend unrecoverable precious time going through the 999 worthless emails..which probably impacts your ability to properly address the important. And if you don’t have a social business solution in your organization, let me know by comment below or reach out to me at louis@creativitycrisis.com and I’d love to share with you how you too can truly learn to be “out of office”.

If you’re interested in what’s next, at IBM we’re combining IBM Watson Cognitive services to communications (like email) to help you identify the important from the trivial. And it’s not based on some filter you create, but rather on the way you work. Who do you interact with? Who are you quick to respond to? What is the tone of the message? Is there a request for some deliverable? All these factors can be applied to help you prioritize your time and attention. For more on this subject, contact me or check out www.ibm.com/watson/work/.