Fantastic blog by Hutch Carpenter about The Passionate Creatives. His blog is always quality. Always new content. Feeling deeply the pulse of the Enterprise 2.0 wave.

A lot in Hutch’s blog post reminded me about the book – The Cultural Creatives – How 50 million people are changing the world. By Paul H. Ray & Cherry Ruth Anderson.

In his recent blog entry, Hutch talks about “Passionate Creatives”.

Especially about passionate creatives at the edges.

Passionate creatives are everywhere among us, but they are not evenly distributed. They tend to gather on the edges where unmet needs intersect with unexploited capabilities.  Edges are fertile seedbeds for innovation.

Or also

Companies are best-served by allowing employees who are attracted to these changes to pursue innovative ways to address them. Why?

They get energy

They get an experimenter’s mentality. They get a happier workforce. Let employees exercise some form of self-organization to accomplish this.

The alternative may be incumbent staffers who have fallen into routines, or

have reason to protect

the status quo

This does not help companies address rising levels of volatility. Free the passionate creatives!

Makes me think of Red Monkey story by Jef Staes. I use it a lot. In every presentation about innovation. It’s where my audience does NOT loose me on my trip to the future.

Let me make another connection here. Just like Hutch, i would like to refer to  A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World by John Hagel.

John Hagel founded the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. And is having a fantastic blog The Big Shift. I had the honor of meeting John Hagel in person during the last Web 2.0 Summit. We had a brief chat on his possible participation to next years Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam.

Have a look at the whole Labor Day Manifesto, and more specifically at the last paragraph:

Stop and think about the last truly great person who left your organization. First think about what made that employee great. We bet you name such characteristics as action-oriented, driven, passionate, fun, and genuine.

Now think about where that worker went. Chances are, to a position with a perceived promise of putting his or her talents to better use—moving into a role with greater challenges and opportunities to learn and make a difference. It wasn’t about money.

What a great test for each organization !

And there is also the interesting innovation blog from Stefan Lindegaard. In his 5 oct post Job Opening- Senior Innovation Manager he describes how difficult it is to find a senior innovation job:

I am sad to say this is just not the time to seek such a job. I see this in the networks I facilitate where many innovation leaders have lost their jobs in the past year. I have been in touch with several of them discussing their options and trying to help them move on. Actually, last year some of them got a new job pretty fast, but this is not happening now. It takes longer – if at all.

Just to give you an idea of how bad the job situation looks like: There are less than 20 companies on Monster.com in the U.S looking for senior innovation managers and offering interesting challenges.

Somewhere in the middle there is a great advice for people wanting to work with innovation:

So my advice to all the people working with innovation right now is this: If you really want to work with innovation, then

your current job

is most likely the best chance to do this.

My dream scenario is that – in these times of crisis, with efficiency programs cutting out the best when focusing solely on efficiency and allowing managers to settle old bills with team members that took the risk to innovate – that the group of passionate creatives on the edges of every company will stand-up, claim their space, and fight to destruct the cynicism that reigns in some many companies.

The root cause for this unbearable cynicism are usually power-games between silos. These power games are putting a major barrier to success to any CEO shouting “change” at the top, as the change – or desire thereto – does not permeate into the lower echelons of the organization, and therefore remains nothing more than

a big illusion

This is the difference between old and new game.

In the new game, we don’t shoot at Red Monkeys, we don’t fire the guys who have the courage to take risk. On the contrary,

we protect them,

expose care, and

channel the energy

for the better of the company

I met a couple of those passionate creatives recently:

what an energy !

If only we could turn the negative cynicism energy into a positive creative energy.

Who feels energized by this ? Let’s join forces. Let me know who you and where you are.