Can the Corporate World Attract Creative Talent?

Everyone who goes to college to become an engineer does so with a goal to someday be given the opportunity to design…

“really cool stuff”

… that will, in turn, make the world a cooler and more innovative place. In fact, while writing this, I heard that very statement echoed on multiple social and streaming media platforms. Even beyond our collegiate years, ask any engineer if they want to be involved in the development of the next exciting technology and their answer will be, “definitely!” The desire to create comes with the territory when you have the internal drive to obtain an engineering degree.

The question often arises at Crane,

“Can and how do we attract creative thinking and creative candidates?”

I can honestly say that even during our visits by our own senior corporate officers, I have been personally asked, “How can we attract more creative engineers?” Since that moment, the question has always stuck with me. It was the moment I realized that I, myself had a part in making sure I maintain a creatively welcome environment among my peers. In fact, what originally attracted myself to crane was a Dyson vacuum. About a month before I had applied to the company, I found myself staring at a Dyson vacuum and saying to myself,

“Did the guy that made vacuums cool know what he was going to do? Or did it all happen by accident?”

A month later I was scrolling through linked in and saw a listing for a pump company and that was the moment I asked myself, “could I someday have a part in making pumps cool?”

Graduating college, an engineer’s drive to find their dream job usually translates into a goal to work for whatever company designed and developed the coolest product they ever experienced in their life. I remind myself of this every career fair I go to for recruiting. The products they dream about are usually ones they were either a prime customer for (cell phones, computer companies, drones), or products they hoped to be able to afford to be a customer for someday (I.e. space travel, fighter jets, sports cars). However, as we start to develop into our careers, many of us see two separate paths. One path is that of research work. A job that means spending grueling hours begging for funding to hope to get the chance to develop a concept of how the next best product could possibly be developed. The other path, is often a corporate one where you’re still begging for funding and approvals, but not as desperately and your career comes with great benefits, a stable income, and a chance to accidentally stumble upon the next big breakthrough…

These are two very different paths.

…For a young mind, one looks to be a path of freedom and exploration, the other, a path of stability and a promise of always being assigned to designing something.

I’ve described the two paths with no official opinion of either, and early in my own personal career, I’ve worked in both career paths, and seen the benefits and challenges of both as well as debunked a lot of the perceptions of both. So the question I bring you, as a question many of our next generation of engineers are going to eventually ask themselves is this: Can you be a corporate engineer, defy the laws of physics, rewrite the way things are done, and influence the technology mindset of every day consumers? Can a large company create an environment that attracts, encourages, and rewards individual thought? Can creative thought processes survive in a 9-to-5 environment? Can innovation prosper amidst timelines, strict budgets, and efficient day to day algorithms? Most importantly, can we create a career environment at Crane Pumps that can offer the best of both paths to future engineers?

There is a common belief, amidst most creative communities, that corporate entities most likely attract more of the people types with left brained personalities. To clarify these would be the people with a more rule driven, technical mindset. We can make the assumption that a corporate 9 to 5 job would attract people that simply put want a more safe, secure and stable career…

…where as your “rule breaker” creative types need flexibility, frequent change of pace, and unpredictability.

We can make the assumption that most of your “innovative thinkers” tend to sway towards entrepreneurship opportunities and research. We could also assume that your creative risk takers need and thrive off of the ups and downs of wondering what next start up company they could be a part of developing, where as a more left brained personality would prefer to have the next 5 years of his career laid out void of any last minute surprises.

Many of these assumptions are true, however, as I have found in my nearing ten years at crane, New product development, specifically, has a mix of both sides of the two career paths. Every new product is changes constantly, much like a “start up” and each becomes held to many strict timelines and trackers, and budgeting at the start of a project can be similar to either career path’s tendencies. As I predicted, before I started, Crane has been a great mesh of both Research AND Corporate backed product development.

I’ve taken some time to ask myself where these assumptions and ideas of what a corporate engineering job is like come from. Who created these ideas in us since young ages? What I’ve discovered is that many graduating engineers see large companies as a way to recover from the grueling, studying and learning that we had put ourselves through during our academic preparation. Simply put, a lot of engineers see a corporate job as an opportunity to finally relax from years of academic competition. I can even admit that looking back, I too remember thinking, “Whew, I’ve finally graduated, no more studying.” In fact, I remember people graduating before me and telling me that graduating was amazing because when the work is over for the day, you get to go home and forget about work. However, years into my career I began to realize that this mindset of no longer studying can be a dangerous one. The reasoning being that in industries where innovation is key, such as software development, late night exhaustive breakthroughs and endless trial an error are key to the success of a company. Breakthroughs always take blood sweat and tears.

Regardless of the ideas being put on engineers as they enter into the workforce, the truth is, that corporations exist because left brain mindsets have given them the stability to survive even without creativity. Corporations become such because their risk is limited, and their success is guaranteed, and sadly and entire company full of right brained engineers would never be labeled as such. Even your most innovative companies can’t survive without a strict network of left brained structures at its core.

I’d like to propose to you the idea that the “corporate mindset” made up of its left brained style of management has been developed in order for it to survive in an environment where most day-to-day activities are performed, because most employees follow the habit of leaving their“right brain”, creative tendencies at home instead of packing them up every morning and bringing them into the office with them. It’s an activity that gets easier to do more you repeat it. What I’m trying to prove to you, is that as we get older, we do this because we find it safer to be less creative. After years of generations, discovering this, in the workforce, rather than try to change this habit, our creative people tend to flock towards jobs that leave them self-employed as entrepreneurs. They do this so that their creativity avoids judgement from others, while those that prefer a more logical day-to-day activity are the ones who flock to the more corporate positions where they, in turn feel more at home and welcome.

This doesn’t mean that being a creative person you can’t have a corporate job, it just means that in all likelihood, if a creative person can’t pretend to be left brained, they typically won’t be happy in a corporate environment. This doesn’t mean that creative person can’t succeed in the corporate world. What this means is that if we want a spirit of innovation in a corporate environment, we have to always be working towards maintaining And inviting it in to our daily work…

We have to make room for the occasional wild ideas to be heard and even “schedule it in” on our calendars…

We have to understand that creativity doesn’t happen at the snap of a finger, we have to be open to the thought that an idea, when mentioned, may need to be tested and developed before its fully proven right or wrong.

Historically, many businesses are run by checklist and procedures and standards, because their goal is to create an environment that puts everyone on the same level of productivity. Creativity, on its own, is anything but efficient, safe or productive. If we want a fully productive process, we have to finely tune out all opportunity for new ideas. THAT is the very idea of an efficient process. Most breakthroughs happen by accident. Take teflon for instance, a chemical that was discovered as a failed by product. Creativity is a risk. Innovation is what happens when we predict that a risk could be very profitable and change change the direction even our competitors do things. Creativity does not always pan out. That’s why we tend to not make room for it, and that’s why we, as employees, often leave it at home when we head to our cars to leave for work. Creativity does not always make money. Innovation is often costly and requires mountains to be moved to almost rewrite the way we’ve always done things…

When creativity makes money, when it’s profitable, that is the moment that it becomes innovation. Otherwise we just call it a “risk”…

Creativity, innovation, they are something that we all have to fight for. The more we get used to trying out crazy ideas the better we will become at suggesting better ideas, and see opportunities when they arise. If we all agree to create an environment where we are willing to take time to test out new ideas, we’ll give a younger generation of engineers more hope for creative job opportunities at corporate positions. Even if you’re not creative yourself, you can fight for the creative ideas of others.

In reality, there really is no difference between a right brained and left brained engineer. To be a great engineer you really need to be able to use both sides. The mindset that we refer to as “left brain“ is the part of us that recalls equations and remembers the procedures we need to do our daily job. Our left brain is what helps us keep straight the rules of physics and science. However, problem-solving, is more of a right brain activity. Anytime you’re faced with something where you don’t know the answer, the only way your left brain can find a solution, is to go through a checklist, marking off each possible solution. When those problems get really hard your only way to find a solution is more of a trial and error type of process. That process is more right brained style of thinking…

Anytime you see an engineer mutter the words, “I wonder“ or, “could that work” or, “let’s think about this“ they’re accessing more of their right brain typed ways of thinking…

The very activity of creative thinking is when your neurons randomly fire in an unexplained sequence till an idea that makes sense arises. If you’ve ever asked a creative person a questions, and gotten a pause before they answer, that’s exactly why they do that, they’re testing random thoughts until one sounds right.

The way our brain conducts right brained problem-solving works in that same way. It consist of random firing of neurons, trying to create new pathways of thinking that didn’t exist before. Right brained thinking cant follow tasks or lists in order to get an answer, its goes against the very process by which it opperates. If you’ve ever been a meeting with scheduled “brain storming” in a “team exercise” you’ll notice right away that your left brained type people will immediately offer up obvious solutions, while the creative ones quietly brainstorm to themselves, randomly thinking of ideas in their head, to theirselves, writing down one idea for every 20 that pass through their thoughts. The turn is that most creative people dislike constant group work, because they think better on their own, and prefer to work as a group AFTER they’ve had their own personal creative sessions.

How did creativity become a group event? Simply put, as creative people flocked away form corporate jobs, and/or left their creativity at home, businesses had no choice but to develop ways and procedures and brainstorming events where creativity could be mimicked in a “ten step process”. I understand that could be hard for many people to hear. However, as we lost creative thinking in the business world, we found a way to emulate it, thus if we want it to come back, we each have to work towards reminding everyone to make time for it. Activities that allow employees to take the time to think creatively on their own and then come together as a group to share their developments is just the way to make that happen, and its actually a practice we’re doing in the engineering department right now.

Sadly, this misconception about being able to fake creativity by making task lists to emulate it, is the same concept by which we’ve programmed things like A.I. and ChatGPT.In our current technological society, we’ve modeled our own computer programming to be creative in the same way that we are creative. I explained how right brain thinking uses randomization, and chat GPT does the same thing, utilizing similar ideas to how our own minds work, they developed equations to mimic the way our creative mind might work. However, we can all thankfully agree that most of what comes out of these creatively mimicking randomizing generators never seems quite right. There’s usually that human touch that’s missing, that we can all feel when we look at anything created by A.I.

In closing, you’ve heard me out on why creativity is a risk, and why it’s inefficient. So you can also imagine why it’s so difficult to keep a creative environment when its very nature can be unpredictable, and often doesn’t tend to follow timelines. However, if you want to find a solution, that’s never been found before, you’ll need to use a more right brained way of thinking because if it sounds familiar or successful based on experience, its a more left brained solution. I’ve encouraged you to fight for a future where our young minds might be encouraged to take more risks, and use their imagination at work. I’ve encouraged you to also fight for your own ideas, and those of your peers. I ask that you at least find one opportunity to do that within the next week after reading this. Imagine the effect we could all have if each of us took that challenge.

Creative ideas are never popular. That’s why they often remain unheard. It’s completely natural for them to get turned down. A truly creative idea won’t check any boxes on any lists, but the best ones check a few ideas from a multitude of lists. Remember that the next time you see a co-worker that tends to be quiet in meetings. What can you do to help create an environment where they feel safe to share their next cray idea. The very existence of an innovative idea will always be rejected because it will not meet the criteria for a solution. A true innovative idea won’t be on your checklist because if it was, it would already exist.