By happenstance and then by design, the Centre for Creativity and Innovation began working with a group of high-performing (measured objectively), highly creative (and recognized by others), diverse organizations based in Boise. As many of us know from living in Boise, Idaho, it’s one of America’s “best cities” – to start a business, for high quality of life, for cycling, for being an entrepreneur…. And on top of that, we have unique creative organizations in a wide range of what might seem like completely dissimilar fields – from dance to law enforcement, software to football. To find such creative organizations in America’s “most remote city,” (five hours by car from the nearest metropolitan area), in a state with fewer than 2 million people, that is larger than the former West Germany, may surprise some. But not those of us who live there.
Indeed, size and place matter, but not the way people expect. Rather than “big cities” being the major or only magnets for creative people and organizations, Boise exemplifies how a strong entrepreneurial spirit develops in out-of-the-way, unexpected places. Perhaps that smallness is just what diverse organizations and their leaders see as an advantage – to learn across fields and disciplines.
The original “Gang of 4” organizations included organizations that formed the basis for a book on organizational creativity. The group included the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, which has been the focus of a Yale Drama School case study and remarkable business model; ProClarity, a global business intelligence analytics firm that built such a successful business and market share that Microsoft bought it in 2006; the Boise State University football program, consistently ranked in the top 25 U.S. programs, despite its much lower level of financial resources than competitor schools; and Healthwise, a health information provider that has led the industry in helping people take responsibility for their own health decisions and was one of the 15 Wall Street Journal small enterprises of the year in 2007.
As we identify more “high performing, highly creative, based in Boise” organizations – the Gang has become larger. The Gang of 6++ now includes even more diverse organizations: law enforcement, dance, and marketing/advertising. The Ada County Sheriff’s Office has a sheriff who teaches in Northwestern University’s leadership program and is developing new approaches to problems like inmate housing. The Trey McIntyre Project is a full time dance company that settled far outside the normal dance hot spots, yet still spends half the year touring worldwide and receives rave reviews in such publications as The Washington Post and The New York Times. Drake Cooper, winner of regional and national advertising awards, has built a regional powerhouse of creative output for a range of clients. Finally, a founder of ProClarity has started a new company – WhiteCloud Analytics – which brings the total Gang to eight. Each of these organizations epitomizes qualities of outstanding creative organizations: never ending curiosity, openness about examining their successes and how they’ve learned from mistakes, relentless attention to building and preserving strong cultures, and a disciplined approach creativity and innovation.
We’ll report on Gang activities from time to time – the annual meeting where they share ideas to the collaboration among members to the “messy problem lunches” the top leaders hold to discuss questions of interest to all of them. The discussions are confidential, yet some of the lessons that emerge are valuable for any organization, Gang member or not!
*Taken in part from an upcoming book, due out Spring 2010 INSIGHT: Encouraging Aha Moments for Organizational Success, by N.K. Napier (Praeger Publishers). Both this latest book and Napier’s earlier book The Creative Discipline, also published by Praeger, 2008, use several of the Boise Gang members as cases.