In my courses I encourage people to bring their creativity to bear on six personal challenges - discovering purpose and career, dealing with time and stress issues, developing and maintaining good relationships, achieving personal/professional balance or synergy in life, finding true prosperity, and bringing one's own creativity into the business and life. Unless people are continually dealing with these challenges, they are not bringing out their best and are not of much use to anyone, particularly themselves and their organizations.

I think that that phrase from the Bible is one of the best definitions of "creative." When you are creative, you are in the world in the sense that you see what it is and know its problems and possibilities. But you are not of the world in the sense that you are not caught up in external things and are coming from your inner resources to create approaches that are yours alone and have potential to change the world.

Living with the exhortation "Be in the World But Not of It," stimulates the best of your analytical skills, deepens your intuition, eliminates destructive competition, develops your skills and creativity serially and painlessly, and develops concentration, efficiency, accuracy, and humor. And that's what a creative life is all about: making it a work of art.

In my courses I encourage people to bring their creativity to bear on six personal challenges - discovering purpose and career, dealing with time and stress issues, developing and maintaining good relationships, achieving personal/professional balance or synergy in life, finding true prosperity, and bringing one's own creativity into the business and life. Unless people are continually dealing with these challenges, they are not bringing out their best and are not of much use to anyone, particularly themselves and their organizations.

Executives run organizations. In business, we need executives who have clarity, people who are in touch with themselves. Then, in leadership and management positions, they can be good role models and leaders. The people I know who have really moved their organizations are scrupulous role models. They are so clear about honesty, integrity, openness, mutual self-respect, dignity for the individual, and creativity, that they don't deviate from these principles at all in their behavior.

Often when people are claiming that they are not creative, they mean that they are not artists, writers, athletes, or any other media types demonstrating creativity. Or they know someone who always seems to have a lot of ideas and know that they can't match that. We all have a tendency to idolize those who create what we see in the media. I think it's better to use these people as models rather than idols, especially when these people have aspects of their lives that are similar to us. Then we can take their inspiration as we go on to be creative in our own way in our own lives.

Yes I can list all sorts of organizational forms and cultural issues that can get in the way of our accessing our inner creativity and bringing it out in our world. And we can use all kinds of approaches that can transform the organization. But unless we have developed a sense of our Self (who we are at core, at our highest) and our Work (the purpose of our existence, the gift that we have to give to the world) and use that to deal with the inner obstacle, we can't sustain creativity in the face of the chaos of the world.