Afternoon Movies and Other Keys to Creativity
By Anne Fisher

(FORTUNE Magazine) – You're the team leader on a crucial new-product design project that's running weeks behind schedule. Your people are tired, tense, and out of ideas, and as the deadline looms, everyone's getting more and more frustrated. What do you do?

If you're Jerry Hirshberg, the former Nissan Design International vice president whose team engineered the Pathfinder, you shut down the whole place in the middle of the day and take everyone to the movies. When your boss asks why you are goofing off when the project is so bogged down, you explain, "We need to go to the movies because we're behind." The result? Recalls Hirshberg: "The tension began to dissipate. Within days ideas started flowing, knotty problem areas unraveled, and the design began to lead the designers, a sure sign that a strong concept was emerging." The team met its deadline, and the Pathfinder became a huge hit. To rev up creativity, sometimes you're better off shifting into neutral than stomping on the gas.

In When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups (Harvard Business School Press, $24.95), co-authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap tell dozens of such tales from inside leading-edge companies, from Fisher-Price to Hewlett-Packard to Southwest Airlines. Their main point: A knack for innovation can be made to bloom "even in groups of people who don't consider themselves particularly creative, or think they have to be."

One key is to assemble groups whose members' ways of thinking are diverse enough to spark "creative abrasion." That happened when Xerox threw artists and computer scientists together and spawned new multimedia technology. Physical surroundings matter too. At Procter & Gamble, escalators have replaced "that great anesthetic of open communication, the elevator."

These days, when even just one good idea at the right moment can make the difference between market dominance and death, the insights in this lively book could turbocharge your team (and maybe even your own career).

--Anne Fisher