There's a wealth of talent that lies in all of us. All of us, including those who work in schools, must nurture creativity systematically and not kill it unwittingly.
— Ken Robinson
You can't just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.
If you're running an engineering or finance company, all companies depend on ideas and ingenuity. I think the principles of creative leadership apply everywhere, whether it's an advertising company or whether you're running a hospital.
Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.
You can be creative in anything - in math, science, engineering, philosophy - as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.
Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields. Some people love doing things they don't feel they're good at. That may be because they underestimate their talents or haven't yet put the work in to develop them.
The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.
Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they're not just lying around on the surface.
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.
Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important - they just don't understand what it is.
Very often, organizations are inflexible because there is too little communication between functions; they are too segregated.
Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.
What you're doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future.
Whether or not you discover your talents and passions is partly a matter of opportunity. If you've never been sailing, or picked up an instrument, or tried to teach or to write fiction, how would you know if you had a talent for these things?
School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines... which makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.
Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly.
Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It is a process; it's not random.
The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it's to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they're valued.
We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It's much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren't present here and now.
You create your life, and you can recreate it, too. In times of economic downturn and uncertainty, it's more important than ever to look deep inside yourself to fathom the sort of life you really want to lead and the talents and passions that can make that possible.
Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.
All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think.
I believe this passionately: that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
