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Creatively intelligent companies and leaders: Arts-based learning for business
Edited by Harvey Seifter and Ted Buswick
Several years ago, my company was asked by Annette Leal, Vice President of US West's Business Enterprise Division, to develop a program to help address the challenge posed by her division's culture, which she characterized as "constrained by departmental walls and resources." Annette believed that these factors led to managerial thinking overly focused on projects that could be affected within specific business units, and also resulted in unproductive competition between units over resources.
Annette's charge to us was to help the division's senior managers overcome their "confined" thought processes, which she felt made it impossible for them to conceptualize new products of the financial magnitude the division was responsible for creating. (The group was only interested in concepts for new products that were over $50 million in potential revenues; nothing under that figure raised their heartbeat.)
Annette proved to be a dynamic, cordial, charismatic business leader who radiated enthusiasm, tempered by instinct and wisdom. She, along with other innovative executives including Sherman Woo, the architect of US West's pioneering intranet system, The Global Village, flourished in US West's relatively open corporate culture, and she encouraged her direct reports to be creative, progressive and to take informed risks in their business development.
After consulting with the client and my team, which included knowledge management expert Richard Baumbusch, I decided on a series of one and two day strategic planning and implementation workshops centered on "Generating the next $2 billion in revenue for Business Enterprise Solutions." By applying the boundary-less Metaphorming process to this challenge, we were confident that we could foster new levels of managerial collaboration, opening the door to the development of applications with greater reach, across markets and products.
Marshalling the intellectual muscle of their cross-functional group, the team ended up reaching their goal - envisioning many new opportunities for US West in the telecommunications industry. This project demonstrated the power of symbolic modeling as a means of accelerating innovation by fostering the connection of people and ideas. Before providing more details of this project, though, it's necessary to explain our methods. This entails going back to basic ideas.
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