Practical Creativity in the Corporate World

Abstract

Creativity and intuition are recurring themes in the management literature of the 1980s. Agor's (1984) Intuitive Management and Owen's (1987) Spirit Transformation and Development in Organizations are examples of the attempts of management thinkers to deal with the “irrational” side of business administration. Although these approaches have helped to liberate managers from the constraints of quantitative models of organization, they are far too superficial to guide decision makers on a day-to-day basis. The thesis advanced is that creativity in business management is largely a qualitative process. The creative manager sees his or her organization in qualitative terms and may rely on linguistic rather than discrete logical processes to identify productive future directions. A configuration formulating a description of linguistic reasoning by financial managers is presented. By constructing qualitative models of organization operations, the authors show how the creative process can be informed and communicated to key actors in the corporate environment. The concept makes use of “fuzzy set theory,” employing a continuous range of values, to develop linguistic “maps” based on expert opinion to specify model parameters. The authors also describe a computer software environment where such models can be constructed and used to support creative thinking.