Youngme Moon is a well-regarded, and highly popular, professor of marketing at the Harvard Business School, and has been on the HBS faculty since 1998. She received her Bachelor's Degree from Yale, and her MA and Ph.D. from Stanford.
In her first years of teaching at Harvard, Dr. Moon found comfort in conformity. She taught what she was supposed to teach. She did the kind of research that was expected of her. She published in the scholarly journals, and wrote for the Harvard Business Review. By her own reckoning, she did not take a lot of risks.
She found this whole persona to be a sham and a facade...as well as terribly frustrating. Her carefully cultivated public persona was not who she really was. Over time, she made the determination to evolve in a direction that was more authentic. She began saying what she wanted to say. She began writing what she wanted to write. In her classroom, she began speaking in her own voice.
Guess what? Her students began responding to her with a new passion. Her colleagues began treating her with a new regard and respect. Her research began taking on a new dimension. In her words, "The amazing thing about authenticity is that once you commit to it, it becomes by nature effortless to pull off."
But the thing I really want to tell you about is her really engaging vimeo, "The Anti-Creativity Checklist"...which looks to be all of the lessons that she has learned in the blood-sport of academia...told with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
For those of you who don't have 5 minutes, here is her tongue-in-cheek list of 14 things "guaranteed to stifle creativity and innovation."
- Play it safe.
- Know your limitations.
- Remind yourself: It's just a job.
- Be skeptical. Show you're the smartest guy in the room.
- Demand to see the data.
- Respect history. Always give the past the benefit of the doubt.
- Crush early ideas.
- Been there, done that. Use experience as a weapon.
- Keep your eyes closed. Your mind too.
- Assume there is no problem.
- Underestimate your customers.
- Be a mentor. [Actually, I don't know what she means by this one.]
- Be suspicious of the "creatives" in your organization.
- When all else fails, act like a grown-up.
What's interesting to me is that, for a lot of us, this list could easily be expanded...and called The Anti-Success Checklist!
By the way, in April, Dr. Moon publishes her first book, entitled"Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd." Looks like a great read!
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