PRODUCTIVITY VERSUS CREATIVITY
The word entrepreneur is derived from the French word, entreprendre, which can be translated "to undertake responsibility." And with responsibility, there is always a weight. How we experience that weight tends to rely on how we analyze our own business. The less clarity in that analysis tends to bear a greater weight on the entrepreneur. While more clarity on the analysis tends to lighten the weight.
The problem with analysis in entrepreneurship is that we often have a narrow view of what we measure. Often times it is our own fault, our financial records aren't as detailed as they could be, we don't know the key numbers to analyze for our own business, we haven't found the smallest increment to catalyze change, and we don't know how to connect the dots between our production, financial, and marketing analytics.
But lately, I've been thinking that it's not just a problem with basic data recording and analysis, but in entrepreneurship, we tended to overlook what we would call in research: a qualitative analysis. That is because it is easy to measure productivity which is quantitative. But last week, during a rousing book club discussion, we spent some time with the statement: you measure what matters. It reminds me of the central theme of Clayton Christensen's must-read: How Will You Measure Your Life.
Creativity is often said to be difficult to measure, but maybe we aren't looking at a complete set of metrics. When I was in college, I was a research assistant on a study about the quality of life for breast cancer patients. This was early 2001 and we used what is known as the FACT-G scale to measure the psychological, social, emotional, and functional wellbeing of patients during their treatments.
Are we missing out on valuable insight by not setting metrics to measure the impact our creativity has on our psycho-socio-emotional well-being as leaders and as humans? Why do we see business as something that should only be measured by productivity and not the impact of our creativity? As I prepare to launch another class in *2023*, these are metrics we'll spend time analyzing and understanding how they actually do contribute to productivity.
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