In this age of intellectual property and branding, creativity is getting a lot of publicity. Everybody seems to want it, but few are able to articulate how to get it and many are buckling under the pressure to constantly come up with new ways to get things done.
When the pressure’s on and the deadline is looming, where do you go to get the creative juices flowing?
Here’s how six successful women answer that question:
Cheryl Berman, chief creative officer for ad agency Leo Burnett USA, gathers the troops–her three kids, a dog and a cat–into her bed on Saturday mornings with husband, Randy, in their Wilmette home to watch cartoons. “I get my best insights at home, living real life with my family like a real-life consumer. My kids should get paid for some of these ideas because they’re really theirs,” says the mind behind such jingles as “Have You Had Your Break Today?” (McDonald’s) and “Remember the Magic” (Walt Disney). The kids, Savana, 13; Sam, 11; and Jake, 7; act as a mini-focus group, rating the commercials between shows. “I wrote “Remember the Magic” over a weekend I spent entirely with my kids,” says Berman.
Laurel Kennedy, a marketing communications consultant in Chicago, takes clients on laser tag excursions and often goes herself to recharge her creative batteries when she’s preparing a corporate executive’s speech or a marketing plan. Similar but less painful than paintball, the laser arcades divide patrons into teams that organize and do battle with one another. “It started with my nephew’s birthday party, and it evolved into my No. 1 team-building exercise,” she says. “It’s totally of the moment, involves all your senses and removes you from the day-to-day milieu.” Kennedy warns that virtual reality substitutions don’t have the same effect. “Lasers are painless, but the experience is very physical. My work is very mental, so it balances me. This completely resets your dial.”
Sara Levinson, president of NFL Properties, the professional football licensing arm, gets her charge from colleagues right in her 16th floor office on
New York’s Park Avenue. As the only woman in her weekly management meetings, she gets the ball rolling by rattling off trend data and then challenging the guys to throw strategy ideas on the table. “I’d like to give an answer like `On the back porch of a beach house on eastern Long Island in the early evening,’ but the truth is creative thinking is a response to the environment. You can’t say, `I take two hours out of every day and that is when I do my creative thinking.’ It’s very much a response to what is going on around you.”
Dru Johnson, president of the League of Black Women and an accounts payable department coordinator for a Chicago law firm, curls up every morning in the same green antique chair for about 10 minutes, or as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. “I sit there and put my thoughts together. It prioritizes things and the (creative) cream comes to the top. I’ve had great ideas for fundraisers there.”
When physicist Marion White of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont gets stuck midway through a research project, she backs off and looks through a new lens. “Seeing a need for something can spark my imagination, so exposing myself to many things provides opportunities for good ideas. I was in the hospital in Germany for an appendectomy and learned that some of the tools they used to operate on me could also be useful in my profession. Brilliant ideas usually don’t pop out of the vacuum but are made possible after a lot of thought and work. Then at the right moment you integrate a lot of things together.”
Tina Borkowski, a 2nd-grade teacher in Bolingbrook, hits the jogging trail every day, rising at 5:30 a.m. to run three miles alone before facing the day’s classroom mayhem. The daily ritual clears her head, but sometimes also produces actual leads. “One time I was struggling with coming up with a descriptive writing assignment about a celebration. I was running along and saw a bunch of apples laying around and remembered the next week was going to be Johnny Appleseed week.” Not quite Newton, but an idea is born.
