When asked whether you are creative or not, I believe 90% will say “no.” I have extreme interest in creativity, especially how to extract creativity out of normal people just like you and me.

I began thinking about this after being asked to facilitate a two hour workshop, a workshop extracting new business ideas from its Japanese employees, here in Tokyo. This was a little over a year ago and was done in Japanese. At that time, I used mindmap(R) and it went OK (I would rate my performance 6 in a 1-10 scale), but since then, I began thinking:

In “A Whole New Mind,” Daniel Pink writes that in McKinsey & Company is hiring more and more MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) grads over MBAs. The acceptance rate of Harvard Business School is 10% but UCLA’s Master of Arts school is under 4%. The need for creativity is growing in an extremely rapid pace but our current education still focuses on analytical thinking.

There was an interesting article in today’s Nikkei newspaper (the Japanese Wall Street Journal) that “Japanese excel when the goal is clear but become confused when the goal gets fuzzy.” A huge paradigm shift has occurred especially after “Lehman Shock” and the age of competing over price and efficiency has moved out of Japan mainly to the emerging world. In order for Japanese companies to stay competitive, the key skill needed today is “creativity.” Probably this is not only a Japanese issue but a developed country issue.

I’ve been reading many books/articles and been talking to many people about this topic since the workshop. What I find very interesting is that most of the research done on this topic is done by non-Japanese. That’s why I wish to pursue this topic deeply through this blog.