Why the most creative people usually fare worst under pressure from greedy bosses

In the fable by Aesop, a man and his wife had a goose which laid an egg of solid gold every day. After a while, they became too impatient to wait 24 hours for the next egg, and wondered how they could get more gold faster. “Where does the gold for the eggs come from?” the wife asked. “What if we could find the source of all that gold?”

So, imagining the bird must have an inexhaustible source of gold inside it, they decided to kill it and cut it open. Of course, there was no gold and they lost the daily egg as well.

I suspect almost every child in the developed world had this story read to them at some time, yet its moral seems to have been completely lost on our business leaders. Greed and impatience destroyed the couple’s source of wealth. The same two processes are destroying the wealth of millions today, especially in industries that rely on creative people.

How it all starts

Comparing creative people to geese who lay golden eggs is not at all far-fetched. Anyone who can produce innovations and fresh approaches to business problems is worth his or her weight in gold to today’s organizations — especially if they can do it on a regular and predictable basis.

But, like the couple in the fable, organizations get greedy and impatient. They want more and they want it faster, so they increase the pressure on those creative types to deliver.

At first, all goes well. The odd thing about creativity is that it thrives on a moderate amount of stress and difficulty. Writers and artists have long understood this. When they set themselves challenging targets, like a poet choosing a specially difficult meter and rhyme-structure, the extra requirements tend to stimulate their ‘creative juices’. In the same way, as those in charge start to increase the pressure, the more talented and creative people respond by being more creative.

What happens next

Of course, the key to using stress and challenges to enhance creativity lies in those words, “a moderate amount.” Another story will explain what I mean.

Imagine that you’re playing some game against an opponent who seems to be just a little better than you are. The extra challenge causes you to ‘raise your game’ and you begin to play better than usual. It’s the same with creativity; just enough challenge produces results you wouldn’t get if you stuck with what you could do easily.

Now suppose your opponent is in reality a great deal better than you are and has been holding back to let you enjoy playing. After a while, he or she gets bored and decides to play properly to finish the game in a hurry. Suddenly, the pressure on your game increases rapidly. You become stressed and flustered. Nothing you try seems to work, while your opponent keeps on setting you harder and harder tasks, just to keep up.

Do you improve you game still more? Or do you become so stressed that you find it hard even to reach your normal standard, making more and more errors and playing worse and worse, until you give in and accept an ignominious defeat?

Stress in small amounts is a motivator; in large amounts, it is a killer

As workplace pressures continue to increase, what happens to creative people is exactly what I just described: their thinking becomes overwhelmed, their creativity falls, and they try to cope by cutting corners and taking greater risks instead of being creative.

Their bosses are systematically killing the geese that used to lay them golden egg after golden egg.

This is what has caused a large part of the current financial crisis in the USA. Banks and hedge funds recruited highly talented and creative people and set them to work discovering ever more complex ways to make money. At first, they were simply encouraged to be creative. Profits rose smartly and, because of this, the bosses began to be greedy, wanting more profit in less time. The pressure on those talented, inventive types increased by orders of magnitude.

The result was a mess, with organizations relying on supposedly ’smart’ ways to make money that weren’t properly tested or understood, or cutting corners on due diligence and normal financial controls.

No gold inside

Now, burdened by the results of their mistakes and forced to cripple others to save themselves, Wall Street’s finest are laying off — ‘killing’ — tens of thousands of talented, creative, but exhausted people — and forcing many other parts of the business world to consider doing the same. No research, no time to be creative, no talented ‘geese’, no golden eggs.

Saddest of all, Aesop explained the exact process and its consequences more than 2000 years ago — and we still haven’t learned our lesson.

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