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.

What is a barrier to one person to creativity is a springboard for another. And the thing that makes the difference from one person or another is how they deal with and are affected by their inner voice of blame and criticism, so-called the VOJ or Voice of Judgment.

When you are living with the exhortation or live-with "Be in the World But Not of It," you experience your connection with all and the possibility of co-creativity and collaboration with those around you. You see an oneness in the world as opposed to warfare, even with those who are your enemies. You are not of the world of conflict, even though you have the strength to deal with it and turn it around. You have compassion in the sense of seeing the highest in yourself and then seeing that in others.

I believe that if one can understand one's false personality or ego, then they can develop self-awareness and the manifesting of that self-awareness is leadership. Such a leader sets up the mechanisms within which creativity can flourish, and managers turn this into innovations in the marketplace and society. But it's never as clear-cut as I'm making it sound. It's much more dynamic, chaotic and fascinating in the way it plays out. That's why people have to operate more from their inner essence; it's the other constant that copes with the legendary constant of change.

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.

The more I do this creative work teaching the "Personal Creativity in Business" course at Stanford the more I realize that business is about people in groups being creative in their own way. If business creativity does not allow individual development, then it isn't sustainable. But if business creativity means people bringing out their best and developing that, then amazing things can happen - not only for the business but also more importantly for the individual and the surrounding community.

People have enough ideas. The real question is "Which ideas are you going to use?".