5 Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership – November 1, 2024

The VIA Institute on Character has grown out of the Positive Psychology sub-field of psychological research. It focuses on character strengths (and their foundational virtues) as bases for deeper self-understanding, growth, and fulfillment. While we also always need to remain attentive to weaknesses or shortcoming and to shifting contexts, this priority can be enormously valuable to creative leaders. The focus for November is on strengths that help us achieve our goals by remaining open to new experiences, fostering motivation despite challenges, and focusing on the good – particularly the character strengths of Perseverance, Hope, and Curiosity – that we can develop every day.

Ravi Kumar S is the CEO of Cognizant, the IT Services company. In this short video, he summarizes his approach to decision-making in business. While he explains the origins of that approach in his training as a nuclear scientist, his advice about coordinating intuition and data is pragmatic and valuable for leaders in many fields. In particular, he describes building hypotheses, testing them with data or other evidence, and then following through by making the decisions. In that last step, he offers a crucial insight about having the courage and commitment to make the decision without absolute certainty or the need for further testing or data collection, yet based in a judgment that the time and decision are mostly correct.

As a longtime American commentator and critic of marketing and brand communications, Marty Neumeier often makes helpfully provocative and heterodox arguments about how to improve creative leadership and creative businesses. Here, he notes a seeming contradiction: business organizations that claim to be committed to fostering creativity from their collective talents rely on traditional top-down strategic decision-making or what he calls, after conventional waterfall project management, “cascading creativity”. Extending agile thinking, he proposes an alternative – “network creativity” – that involves everyone in an organization more deeply in the what’s and the how’s of strategic and creative decisions. The short post summarizes one of the ideas from his book, Scramble: How Agile Strategy Can Build Epic Brands (2018).

Central to the responsibility of creative leaders is active leadership of our communities and societies facing uncertainty and change. While many of us cannot make decisions or act with the same direct impact on these concerns as we do with our clients or in our businesses, our creative leadership practices should include regular learning about macro-level issues and the potential implications of our everyday work in business and with technology. Ida Kymmer, the global thought leader and interpreter of new technologies including the metaverse and AI, gathers each week an insightful digest of news and commentary about the deployment of technology in war and peace contexts. This week’s newsletter addresses the critical and timely topic of AI and some of its potential applications.

New York University professor Aswath Damodaran is among today’s most incisive thinkers about corporate valuation and market dynamics. His new book, The Corporate Life Cycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications, examines as a key to understanding company growth and decline – and the differing forms of leadership needed to be successful at stages of the cycle. Damodaran discusses the core ideas from the book with Martin Reeves, Director of the BCG Henderson Institute and regular host of the essential podcast, “Thinkers & Ideas”, which consistently features brief but pointed interviews with authors about recent books related to leadership, innovation, technology, and strategy provides a useful platform for authors to introduce their work. 

Bonus: For those of you celebrating this week, Happy Halloween! Here’s a little creative leadership horror film … 👻