PERSONAL
EXPERIENCE - Target
My last job was in the merchandising
pyramid at Target’s corporate offices.
Target is a company that has a reputation for being creative, especially
when it comes to their advertising. I
really enjoyed working for a company that is seen as artistic, modern and “cool”. But, for the most part the creativity that
was seen by outsiders was a function of the marketing pyramid. The actual office setting was much more
traditional for a large corporation, especially in the merchandising pyramid.
One thing that Target did really
well to foster creativity was to transition people into new roles fairly
often. An employee would typically spend
18-24 months in one role before being promoted or moved to another category. For example, I started as a Business Analyst and
spent 12 months running the film, one-time-use camera, and camcorder categories. I was then promoted to Sr. Business Analyst and
changed categories to digital photo frames and kid’s cameras. After another 12 months I was promoted to
another division to manage the remodel/P-Fresh (adding fresh grocery to an
existing general merchandise store) projects.
The grocery business was very different than the electronics business,
but I was still able to connect my past experience with this new category and
make changes to existing processes.
After 18 months I moved to a manager role in completely new categories. This is fairly typical at Target – once you
feel like you know exactly what you are doing and how to run your business you
are moved somewhere completely different with very different categories. This focus on getting exposure to multiple
businesses not only expands an employee’s business knowledge, but also expands
their network. This style supports the
article’s claim of the importance of devoting time to cross-pollinating with
fields outside of our area of expertise.
I definitely experienced increased creative problem solving in my more
recent roles because I had a larger knowledge base and also had more people to
bounce ideas off of.
Target does do a few things that
probably hinder creativity. First of
all, they are known to hire by “fit” which means that many of the people who
work there are very homogeneous. It is a
lot of Type A, young (average age in merchandising is 25), and many are from
the Midwest (because it is hard to get people to move to MN). Around Minneapolis Target is known as
slightly cultish because all of the employees look somewhat alike and they all
socialize mostly with other Target employees.
This homogeneity inhibits creativity because many of us had similar experiences
in our past. I would also say that the
office surroundings do not inspire creativity.
The 26 floors in the main building all look exactly the same (cubicles,
corner offices for directors, conference rooms). But, many employees take the time to decorate
their cubes with Target branded items (stuffed dogs, mugs, etc.) and items from
their business. For example, the best smelling floor in the building was the
Household, Personal, Baby floor because of all of the cleaning supplies and
detergents that decorate the cubes.
People seemed to be happier and work more productively in an environment
in which they were able to express some of their creativity within.
CREATIVITY
CHARACTERISTICS
I believe there are many different
ways in which people can be creative. I
traditionally think of creativity in the more artistic way as in painting,
music, film, design, etc. Throughout my
life I have tried to participate in these activities and have always felt moderately
sufficient at them. But, I recognized
that there were many people who had far greater creative skills than me. I do think that it was important for me to
try my hand at these skills at some point in my life so that I could better
appreciate people who were above and beyond creative. I do think that I am capable of being
creative in a variety of ways, but maybe not a shining star in the arts. I hope that my creativity will be able to
show through in my career in marketing. Although
working in brand management at a CPG will have elements of creativity, there
will also be a lot of hard work and analytical thinking (which I think I am
better at). What I am the most excited
for is working with the creative agencies to get more exposure to different
working and thinking styles. The advice
that I took from this article was:
- Make sure to seek out different points of views and get different experiences
- Let you mind rest and your brain will keep working on a solution
- Innovation can come from understanding pain points
ARTICLE
ANALYSIS
I really enjoyed this article and
the claim that creativity is a skill that anyone can learn. Something that stood out to me as a really
relevant point was the idea that creativity and innovative solutions can come
out of a pain point. The example they
gave was the man who invented the post-it glue when he realized the pain of
keeping his place in his church choir book.
I like the creative process that comes with solving a problem – it seems
more realistic to me than someone just coming up with an idea out of thin
air. For example, I was visiting a
friend over spring break that has a two year old. She showed me one of his toys which was a
simple bubble blowing toy. But instead
of pulling out the wand and getting your fingers all sticky you squeeze the
bottle and the wand floats up to the top.
Then you can easily blow bubbles for kids without the mess. I like this creative process – identify a
pain point and come up with a creative solution. This process can be enhanced by the many ways
they spoke about in the article such as seeking out diverse experiences,
cross-pollinating with other fields, and collecting lots of dots and later
linking them together.
- “Get Groggy” – I tend to get sparks of creativity right before I go to bed or right away in the morning. It seems like my brain is just working in the background when I am not directly thinking about the problem at hand.
- “Think Like a Child” – I relate this one to solving pain points. As an adult most of us have come to accept things that we can’t control or think are minor annoyances, but kids might see them as something that would be able to be fixed.
- “Work Outside the Box” – It is important to get outside of your cube to get your mind moving.
- “Move to a Metropolis” – I like this idea because it really does promote diverse thinking and an increased exposure to more creative activities and people.
