You Can't Squeeze Creativity From a Pie Chart

But as I point out in Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), as the knowledge economy morphs into the creative economy, and the digital infrastructure of our "flat" world rapidly accelerates the pace at which innovation happens, leaders badly need to master more inventive forms of thinking.

Whether it's a matter of stimulating entrepreneurial teams to create the Next Big Thing, figuring out how to exploit an emergent opportunity, or visualizing future developments that could help or seriously hurt the company, leaders can no longer rely on analytical/quantitative methods that try to predict the future by extrapolating logically from the past.

When we look at examples of scientific, technological, commercial and artistic breakthroughs -- the discovery of DNA, the rise of the personal computer, Barbie, supersizing, Frank Gehry's architecture -- we typically find the same set of mental capacities: intelligence, imagination, intuition and insight, or what I call "the 4i's."

Mattel executives, for example, fiercely resisted Ruth Handler's initial concept of an 11-inch adult doll. Market analysis showed that what little girls wanted to do was play mommy -- hence the huge market for chubby baby dolls.

But Handler, watching her daughter play with paper dolls, intuited that girls also liked to fantasize about their future life as adults. Intuition turned to insight when she encountered a quasi-pornographic German doll and realized that sex, in the form of a curvaceous figure and glamorous outfits, would be an irresistible sales factor. She was right, of course. Barbie is now a $3.4 billion global industry with brand recognition on a par with Coca-Cola.