“We often wrongly assume that commodity jobs are filled with commodity people. Everyone was born with the capacity to create.”

While we know a lot about how to engender human creativity — equip people with innovation tools, allow them to set aside time for thinking, de-stigmatize failure, create opportunities for serendipitous learning — little of this knowledge has infiltrated management systems. Worse, many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. They assign the label “creative” to select individuals and roles — and tacitly (or not) relegate the rest to mundane work. Management processes must nurture innovation in every corner of the organization.