“There are creative ways of making the business more efficient and I think that we are already quite efficient as it is. But creativity as a characteristic of your service to market towards a domestic audience is, I think, not much of an advantage. It may be when you are talking about overseas based clients though.
What is more likely to happen is that you will be presented with opportunities which will require creative responses in terms of management. If, for example, we are suddenly presented with a big opportunity and we have to address it with limited resources then we have to work out how we are going to address the opportunity within our constraints. This will require a creative response. However, if there is no business imperative then it is difficult to be creative.”


****************************************************
This post is part of a series of excerpts from interviews with foreign executives in Japan, focusing on creativity. Excerpts have been edited for confidentiality.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in relation to this topic. Please feel free to comment directly on this site or get in touch at chris@a-small-lab.com (Chris Berthelsen)
All content on this IDEAS and DISCUSSION blog is provided by a-small-lab under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License: You can SHARE this content as long as you CITE this work, and TELL US about your work (and send us a copy or link!). See Creative Commons for more detail