I spent the last couple of weeks talking about the dark side, which is when people and businesses don’t fulfill their creative potential. A lot of the clients that we work with at Corporate Punk are sort of in the dark side, and it is our jobs to help them have brighter futures. So, this is a good time to talk about what does a bright future look like. What happens when businesses breakthrough and fulfill that creative potential? What conditions are needed to bring this about?

There is a lot of euphemistic and misleading language out there about creativity and productivity at work. It has become really fashionable to talk about business happiness or employee engagement. Still, it seems these concepts are kind of loose and not particularly well defined. When talking about employee engagement it really is a vague sense that people enjoy coming to work. When we talk about creative potential being fulfilled, what do we really mean? Today we are going to get beyond the language of employee engagement and happiness at work to really define what creative potential actually looks like.

What we really mean by creative potential being fulfilled is that the business and the people that work for the business are performing in three ways.

● Purposeful - The reason why we get out of bed in the morning. Why does it matter? Purpose is about where our business and our people are passionate. Where the business adds value and how that value intersects with market opportunity.

● Pleasurable - The value that we are extracting. When you are doing something that you care about, you are going to enjoy the work that you do. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t work and their isn’t frustration, but there is also a real sense of value about what you do.

● Profitable - The engine that allows us to do more of this even bigger and better. Work in ways that are profitable. Reframe profit with how it combines with purpose and pleasure. In most businesses, profit is critical. Without profit a business can’t do what it has set out to do.

3 Diagnostic Questions:

● Is everybody in your business performing from where they are strongest?

● What is the return we are getting out of the work we are doing?

● What does this place feel like to work in?

This all points into the direction that creative thinking can’t happen without optimism. We can’t make a positive impact in the world, if we are not feeling good about the impact those ideas will have. Remove the barriers to optimism, and you are removing the barriers to creative thought.