'Highly Creative People'

Good essay

It’s worth remarking that when Grant studies historical movements, they are always leftish or liberal ones: women’s suffrage, the civil-rights uprising, people who helped Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, a former student leader from Serbia who took part in a movement that overthrew Slobodan Milošević and whose clenched-fist logo Grant reproduces on page 223. These are whom we must look to in order to derive lessons for how to manage employees and come up with new business ideas.

One reason for this distinct liberal bias is that it serves to camouflage the essential elitism of the creativity genre. Another is that Grant, like so many other management thinkers, feels he must call bosses “radicals” and compare their role in our civilization to those of protesters and revolutionaries who overthrow “the status quo.” Naturally, someone looking for lessons in capitalist radicalism would start his inquiry by examining genuine radicals.

Sometimes, though, it just feels like the author is trolling us. Officers in the US Navy aren’t “radicals” or “tempered radicals,” as Grant refers to them, even if they do think software is more important than hardware. The low point comes in chapter 3, where Grant describes the struggles of an executive at the CIA to get that agency to put more information on its “classified internet,” presumably so its agents can go about spying, subverting, and droning with more efficiency than before. Fair enough. But what perverse urge makes the author describe this quest as a “countercultural” one? Or as an effort to “speak truth to power”? Or as a project that involves “building a network of rebels within the CIA”?