What makes a city a world city? One element everyone agrees on is creativity - including creative leadership. This is a hot topic these days and a pet interest of Robert Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association.
He and a few other high-profile researchers at Yale and Harvard universities are considered to be at the forefront of psychological research on creative leadership. They define it in ways that run counter to conventional wisdom.
Creativity is as much about choice as anything else, say Dr Rosenberg and co-authors in a paper to be published by Leadership Quarterly. Exceptional skills, and maybe in some cases a certain set of innate abilities, are normally necessary. But this is not sufficient. What is also required is a particular sort of attitude: the inclination to go against the flow of things; the impulse to resolve to do things a given way, even in the face of 'tried and tested' precedents, to stubbornly follow one's instinct, irrespective of the resistance and discomfort that generally ensues.
But, again, this is not due to the fact that creativity flows from a person because they have or believe they have superior instincts to those around them. Rather, they simply display an unusual fusion of nerve and motivation to follow whatever instincts they happen to feel on a given occasion, whereas other people would 'see reason'.
Creative people may end up being wrong as often as right. But some people are discouraged from deciding to be different by one wrong decision to do so. Others show an incredibly 'illogical' tenacity to tread an alternative path, despite the repeated negative feedback of failure.
Creativity and leadership are hard to tease apart. Just as there is a creative element in all successful leadership, there exists a leadership component in creativity. Contrary to their romantic image, famous artists are invariably motivated to promote their work - to lead the public to an understanding or appreciation of what they express.
What they do requires an audience, so they have to be fairly hard-headed when it comes to pushing their way into the public eye. This is matched by an unusually low need for approval. Similarly, the most exceptional leaders in history were anything but crowd-pleasers. They raised a population's game, as it were, rather than playing by existing rules.