Google’s Approach: Creative Disorganization
From an interview with Steven Levy, author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.
“Google’s philosophy is to hire really smart people and not handcuff them or limit what they do. So there is a degree of what they would call creative disorganization, and what some people would call chaos.
They encourage people to come up with ideas that might seem a little crazy or out of the box. They quite famously have this program where you can spend 20% of your time doing something that you don’t need approval for, and a lot of their important products come out of that program. Now some people joke that it’s really 120%, because you still do your work anyway. But being able to keep working on something that you’re passionate about — and if it works out becomes your full-time job, your 80% — has led a lot of people to work that way.
It’s interesting that as Google becomes a bigger company, it’s more difficult to maintain that very delicate balance of creativity and organization.
In some ways they’ve had to rein in some of the disorganization just so things don’t get out of hand. But they still understand the importance of it and are struggling with ways to keep it fresh, and to keep these opportunities in front of their employees, in part because they realize that great new products are going to come from it. But also because generally the people they hire are smart and restless people, and unless they give them the opportunity to do something interesting they’ll leave.”
See Steven Levy’s take on where Google might be headed in the travel sector in The Google-ization of Travel, Travel Weekly PLUS, Oct. 3.
Talking to a whole bunch of highly creative people has given Julie Burstein a lot of insight into the dynamics of creativity.
Burstein is a Peabody Award-winning public radio producer and the author of Spark: How Creativity Works (HarperCollins). The book is a collection of stories about artists drawn from hundreds of hours of conversations featured on Studio 360, the public radio show designed by Burstein in 2000 and hosted for more than a decade by Kurt Andersen.
The book is about painters and sculptors, writers and musicians, architects and filmmakers. How they approach their 
work offers lessons in creativity that are applicable in business, Burstein says.
“What artists do so beautifully is they figure out the questions themselves — they don’t just do what they are told to do,” she said. “And I think that’s a really wonderful endeavor to look at, because we all have to figure out the questions we need to ask ourselves in order to move forward.”
What can business people get from stories about artists and the work they do?
A number of business publications and organizations have asked me to speak about the book because the stories these artists tell are not just stories about how they make paintings or compose songs. They’re really stories about things we all face — stories about how to embrace adversity, to take something that is a central challenge and figure out how it might also reveal the next piece of your work.
I’m thinking about the painter Chuck Close, he’s in the first chapter in the book. He paints portraits, and he has a certain kind of learning disability called prosopagnosia, which means he can’t recognize faces in three dimensions. He took what can be a very debilitating challenge and turned it into his work — he takes photographs and makes these extraordinary portraits from them, and through the act of doing that he can actually commit a face to memory in a way he couldn’t have if he just saw someone sitting across from him. So there the disability itself became the cutting edge of his work.
And the writer Richard Ford talks about how he is still so dyslexic he can’t read silently much faster that he can read out loud. But Ford said dyslexia really helped him write sentences, because he heard the music in language that he wouldn’t have heard had he been moving faster.
It’s these sorts of central stories — issues of challenge and issues of conflict — that are very powerful, not just for artists but for all of us, as parents, as people in the workplace.
How do you define creativity?
That’s one of the toughest things I always get asked. For me creativity is making something that didn’t exist before. That could be an extraordinary work of art, or it could be dinner. There is a way of approaching the work that we do creatively — it could be a budget, it could be a spreadsheet. When approached in a certain way, this is all creative work. Of course there are levels of creativity. But I do believe that, at bottom, when you make something that didn’t exist before that is a creative act.
That’s a wonderful perspective, although I don’t know how many people who do budgets and spreadsheets would consider it creative work.
But if you look at a budget for a new venture, that’s just somebody’s best idea of what’s going to happen in the future. It’s not documenting something that’s already happened; it’s using all the skills you have to predict what’s going to happen in the future. Having done many budgets and spreadsheets myself, I know it requires a kind of creativity and imagination. True, it’s not something that you think of in the same breath as you think of making a movie, but it does, I believe, require creativity.
If people shifted to thinking about the work they do as creative, it could open up new and unexpected ways of doing things in a business.
The people who are leading are the people who have the power to allow that to happen. It’s about creating a culture in which new ideas are listened to. Sometimes it’s not even the ideas that are most important, it’s the questions: We are doing it this way, but something keeps sticking, it’s not flowing smoothly. How do we figure out what we need to do to change that?
In the business culture we feel so much more comfortable if we have the answers, but what we often really need are the questions, and being able to hold those questions, live with the questions, until we can see the answer. Sometimes things move so quickly it’s very hard to do that.
I think the people who are comfortable living with uncertainly the way artists do — the people who are able to see 
beyond what they need to do by the end of the day and imagine what they might be doing six months or a year from now — those are the people who are going to be able to make a real impact on this very quickly changing world of work.
Can businesses themselves be creative entities? Or is it only individuals?
I think it takes a particular kind of leadership that can be open to the things that are required in order for creativity to flourish. As I talked about with Chuck Close, that can be understanding what your challenge is and how your challenge may in fact be the cutting edge of what you need to explore. Or understanding that conflict is part of how you get to something new, and creating a culture within your business that allows room for creative and productive conflict.
I do see a similarity between the artists in Spark and business leaders of innovative companies. Often they are the ones who are able to lead the organization through asking questions rather than offering answers to everybody. There are contradictions to that, like Steve Jobs who probably had an answer for everything. But in many businesses that I’ve seen, the way to open up the culture to innovation is to ask a lot of questions, and to encourage people to ask those questions themselves.
How about the travel industry? Do you see it as a generally creative industry?
The people in the travel industry are in the business of creating experiences for other people. It may be a leap, but I think the travel industry is in a similar field to art and artists in that what you’re tapping into is wonder and delight.
That’s why people want to go on a cruise, or want to go visit a place they’ve never seen before, or want to stay in a particular hotel. It’s because they are going to discover things they’ve never experienced before, and sometimes they’ll find new things that will shake them up and allow them to think differently about their lives back home.
What art does when it’s at its best is it changes the way we see the world, and that’s what travel does, too. We come home thinking differently about our own lives. I think that’s the most powerful resonance between what the artists in Spark talk about and the work that people in the travel industry do.
Julie Burstein’s conversations about creative approaches to the challenges, possibilities, and pleasures of everyday life and work are available online at pursuitofspark.com.